What does it take to differentiate a product? According to Stafanie Yang at PKP, it has to do with selecting your company's specific working criteria and sticking to them. In PKP's case, the focus is always on producing high quality dispensing that undergoes exacting quality control processes.

What is your position, Stefanie, and what does it entail?

I’m the Assistant Manager of the Sales Division at PKP, I manage international sales and marketing activities. The goal of my department is to explore global opportunities and target specific brands or sectors where we want to foster growth.

PKP manufactures proprietary spring accessories and has an advanced tooling management system - what do you actually produce?

We focus on selling and manufacturing plastic trigger sprayers and dispensing pumps, particularly spray pumps for industrial usage and consumer household products. We insist on 100% control of our quality management. We need to be able to foresee and prevent any possible changes that might cause product defects. That’s why we have our own spring production facility and a tooling management system, as you mentioned. We've been around for about 40 years and in that time we've built up a portfolio we're quite proud of, based on professional experience, mature know-how, and an excellent engineering team. We provide best the possible solutions to brands in order to help them create better product value. If a piece of packaging works, people don't notice. It's like a door - you just use it and you forget it's there until it jams and you can't use it. We create dispensing solutions that work, over and over, and are never an impediment to the consumer. Hence, the consumer always enjoys a positive experience and that sets the scene for a repurchase. Companies and consumers lose fidelity if they encounter obstacles, so we go out of our way to remove them. Everything in our catalogue is manufactured by us in Taiwan, we don't distribute. That way, we retain control over the quality of our products.

Where does PKP operate?

We're located in Nantou City, the only city in Taiwan that doesn’t have a coastline. I and my team work internationally, usually in Europe and North America. We have an excellent reputation in the Asian region and what we're trying to do is spread out by introducing our packaging dispensers to food companies abroad. At the moment, that means that we focus on the European and North American markets, we have a very wide range of customers in numerous countries worldwide. Based on a company’s needs, we can provide professional trigger sprayers, mist sprayers, and dispensing pumps for all kinds of packaging. Consequently, we work with companies in various sectors including those that work in food, toiletries, gardening, hardware, chemicals - almost everything consumers and institutions use on a daily basis.

What changes has your firm undergone over the last decade?

Many! We've grown a lot over the last decade. We became more outward-looking then and the time and effort we've invested in expansion are really paying off. We knew that we would have to keep up with demand, so in 2012 we built new facilities in order to fulfil increasing production requirements. in 2014, we added a specialized production and quality control management system for food-safe packaging production. Everything is going very well. At the moment, we are focusing on promoting our dispensing pumps to food brands, mostly for sauces used in professional kitchens, fast food restaurants, cafeterias, etc.

What challenges does your firm currently face? How do you plan to surmount them?

At PKP, we do things very carefully and thoughtfully, this has kept us going strong for 40 years and we are still growing. When we see a challenge, we don’t consider it a threat we see it as an opportunity for to try something new, to evolve, to change. We have a lot of different and advanced management systems in our company in order to provide better solutions. At the moment, we're in a bit of a crisis lull, we don’t have any major challenges we're facing at the moment, but we believe that we always have to try new things and improve, without fear and without compromising our integrity or adherence to high levels of quality. We work with a lot of brands, like Dunkin Donuts, Monin, Giffard, Melaleuca, Ecolab, Cosway, and many more. One of the primary reasons they work with us is our attention to detail and our ability to provide dispensing that's consistently smooth, fluid, and error-free.

How is digital marketing integrated into your expansion plans?

We have been working online for some time, but we updated our web site back in 2013, and we have successfully used it as the basis for our online efforts. We look forward to getting to know more international buyers from all over the world via the Webpackaging community and we do a lot more on social sites. We're particularly interested in developing relationships with Eastern Europe countries, that's at the top of our priority queue. In general, digital marketing requires a lot of care and attention, so we're trying to incorporate the digital environment into our corporate culture. Thus far, doing so has helped us open up new markets and make contact with firms we would have not had access to previously.