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Collcap develops the glorious new bottle for Lipsy's "Caged" fragranceExpansion into France - Spotlight on CollcapSwift airless solutions: spotlight on CollcapYes, tubes can be luxurius
Collcap Packaging, a familiar name to many companies in the upscale cosmetic and personal care spaces, started out as a small business sourcing and selling caps and closures in 1993. The company has grown over the last few decades and now offers a wide variety of standard products to appeal to a range of market sectors. What the company excels at, however, is creating amazing bespoke designs for clients, making them genuinely unique in a market full of packaging noise.
Unknown to many, Collcap was the first cosmetic packaging supplier to offer 3D printing technology, now a well-established part of the company's daily routine and hugely popular with customers. The new technology enables Collcap to cut costs and timescales and the speed at which basic prototypes can therefore be made into physical objects is swift. In fact, Collcap's design team is often able to create functioning models from virtual CAD designs within 72 hours. From the perspective of providing an excellent customer experience, the technology gives clients the opportunity to hold a model of their product within days, without associated tooling costs, and the potential to reduce lead times by 6-8 weeks.
To a company that is renowned for its bespoke packaging solutions, especially for firms in the luxury market, the introduction of 3D printing technology has just about become an indispensable step in the design process. Collcap's design capabilities are consequently able to cover an extensive range of packaging products and cosmetic and skin care accessories. The company has especially developed an excellent reputation for taking bespoke glass containers and closures to the European fragrance and skin care markets, though the outlook of the firm remains global (apart from its UK headquarters, the company has offices in France, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) . By staying ahead of the game and keeping its finger on the pulse of packaging innovation, Collcap is always looking for ways to integrate new discoveries and practices, thereby freeing design and development experts from being bound to one technology.
As an innovative firm, Collcap is a big proponent of airless technology. So much so that recently the company became the exclusive distributor of Samhwa packaging concepts, a Korean manufacturer of airless systems and premium bi-injected colour cosmetic packs. Collcap began to work with Samhwa in 2012, offering its customers access to a range of innovative cosmetic and skin care packaging unavailable elsewhere in Europe. Samhwa was formed in 1977 as a moulding company, garnering decades of experience in the cosmetic packaging industry before establishing itself as a specialist in airless containers in 1997. Since then, Samhwa has rapidly developed a reputation as a consistently innovative, forward-thinking manufacturer, producing finest-quality airless packs.
The partnership between the two companies brings to customers a wealth of shared experience including dedicated R&D teams, 3D design and modelling, in-house bespoke tooling, testing and compatibility, in addition to a range of innovative cosmetics and skin care packaging unavailable elsewhere. Dave Cobley, Manager for European sales at Collcap, states "Many brands are now using airtight formats in conjunction with their BB and CC creams, to protect their advanced, lighter formulae, and this trend seems to be hitting its stride in the mid-luxury sector throughout Europe." On the basis of this, Collcap is putting particular emphasis on airtight compacts with a patented bi-injection sealing mechanism supplied exclusively in Europe from Samhwa.
The ingenious new compact system focuses on keeping products fresh and as ready to use as possible, both on the shop shelf and in the home. The new compacts offer a new sealing mechanism, such that both solid and liquid bulk formulations are preserved in an airtight environment throughout the product's use. Each compact offers a bi-injected seal on the inner PP case.
The top portion, which normally holds an applicator sponge or pad, swings open and closes firmly to keep the product reservoir underneath sealed. This virtually eliminates spoilage or product loss due to moisture or gas loss. Thanks to extensive testing, the compacts have been developed to a point where product weight loss has been brought down to approximately 3% over the course of a year's testing.
The benefit to the consumer is obvious: each compact, providing an airtight environment, ensures products do not dry out over the course of time and become unusable, a key point in favour of airless concepts. By eliminating the premature disposal of a dessicated product and providing an overwhelmingly positive post-purchase experience, repeat business is virtually guaranteed. Each compact is available with sponges designed to fit in the novel packaging concept, and provide consumers the optimal solution for the application of cosmetic foundations, shadows, blushes, and more. The Collcap/Samhwa partnership has also resulted in the manufacture of a range of airless jars and dual chamber airless pump packs which meet not only the demand for airless packs, but also for the separation of certain products for the consumer to mix at the moment of use.
The compacts offer a new sealing mechanism, such that both solid and liquid bulk formulations are preserved in an airtight environment throughout the product's use.
