In my fifty year career in bottle industry, I found that innovations in new materials and manufacturing technology were always changing. So in many cases I would learn many of these new techniques while visiting old and new factories that were making bottles in glass and a variety of plastic containers. I loved the education I absorbed during this period of my life. One example is my project in a toilet cleaning product called Tidy-bowl. During my
research I found that the current package for this product contained a glass jar, two plastic lids and a paper seal that also required assembly. .
The tinted blue product in the contaner in not a liquid, it's a solid that releases the blue product in the t0ilet bowl when it hits the water. That's when I realizezed that my customer was paying eighty cents for each bottle sold. What a waste of $$$. If it wsn't for the fact that a manufacturer in New Jersey (PVC Container) had developed a process where they could make a custom design bottle that would function the same as the orginal. With the assistance of our design group in Chicago, a unique bottle with a hole on top for fill the bottle, and two additional holes on each side to release the solid blue product when it desolves in the water with each flush in the tolit bowlwhould only pay Tweleve cents to market his prouct insted of eighty cents. my client, wold save almost one million dollars a year. My customer wasn't sold on this idea until we made a protype contaniner for testing. Wow! it turned out to be a win,win when we
manufactured two million new packages every year.
The Tidy-Bowl is a success story based on an important observation that a manufacturer had develpoed an inovation that could be applied to save money on by improving an existing product on the market that was over packaged, for its function.
But ther are many other successful products that start with an idea. For example a shampoo for children to be sold by Disney. This new bottle has to be unique by nature and customised for the Disney brand. We gave this challenge to our design department and creative group at the W. Braun Company in Chicago. We were confident that our experianced world class designer, Nathan Lerner, with his creative apprentice Craig Sawicki will wow, the Didney Excutives in Orlando, Florida with sometng that they had never seen before. Meanwhile my company had a number of patented designs based on the principles of a Laboratory Wash Botte. This conceot was so unusual because it would dispense the liquid shampoo product from the base of the bottle with a gentle squeeze through a tube (that was made as part of the plastic bottle itself.) To make it more interesting for children. our design group suggested that Disney mount a removable toy float on the top of the bottle, for the bath-tub. We made samples of some of our Patented,
Plastic dispensing bottles to prove that the dispensing feature would work properly and it did. The success of the W. Braun Company was largly based on our research and development group who always prsued and patented many of our new packageing ideas
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