New Packaging Keeps Hunt's Sales Sharp

Most manufacturers take notice when Wal-Mart hints that it had better improve its packaging or else. That's the position Hunt Manufacturing found itself in with its Boston Bulldog brand of manual pencil sharpeners."Wal-Mart asked our marketing people to improve the stand-alone quality of the sharpeners and asked that we put them into clamshells," explains John Fleming, engineering manager for the Statesville, N.C.-based company. "The changes we made probably saved our product line, as far as Wal-Mart was concerned."The solution came from a new sealing machine and imitation clamshell design produced by Alloyd Co., a packaging company based in Dekalb, Ill. Alloyd showed that not only could the new approach meet all of Wal-Mart's goals, but it would produce significant productivity improvements for Hunt as well."The existing package was a fold-up clamshell that was very labor-intensive to fill," explains Kent Hayward, product manager for machines at Alloyd. Fleming agrees, "It was an ungainly package. It hung well, but it wouldn't stand, and customers wanted the package to do both." In addition, manually feeding in the backer card slowed the packaging process down considerably.To address those concerns, Alloyd created a new concept for the package, produced some samples to illustrate how it would work and showed Hunt officials how the design could be fed into Alloyd's new sealing machine more easily than the existing packages, says Hayward. Using a complete system of packages and machinery from Alloyd meant the company would assume single-source responsibility for ensuring that the packages did the job.That approach, and the sealing machine itself, offered a pivotal argument, admits Fleming. "We'd talked to Alloyd previously on other projects about their sealing machines, and we were looking for a way to get one of them, because it gave us a lot of benefits. So this new design that fed through their machine fit with those plans perfectly."The new packaging is made of a clear, 20-millimeter PVC that allows the bright colors of the vacuum-mount model of pencil sharpener to attract attention on the shelf. The shells are sealed to each other with bar welds on the right and left sides. The bottom is held together with interlocking tabs on each blister half.The shells are fed into a 16-station carousel RF-sealer, which uses automatic feeding systems to load and seal the blisters. One side of the blister is fed onto the track, and an operator drops the sharpener in. The loaded blister then cycles back around, where the graphics card and the other half of the blister are put in place. The blisters are sealed together via radio-frequency energy, which melts the plastic in place."The new machines and the blisters absolutely improved our productivity," Fleming states. For the vacuum-mount model, output rose from 2,000 filled shells per eight-hour shift to 8,000, the company estimates. Although gains weren't as high for the standard model, the machine is also being used for other products, where productivity has also risen, Fleming says.Sales rose along with productivity, as the new packaging proved to be more eye-catching, says Fleming. Sales on the regular mount rose about 20 percent after the new designs entered the market last summer, while sales on the vacuum-mount rose about 8 percent, he estimates. "We're very enthusiastic about the machines and the new packaging."

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