The demand of the decorative diffuser bottles dealer by a home fragrance distributor company in Porto, Portugal went up as they started supplying the lifestyle retailers in the Iberian region. In need of a more stable and design able production partner, they chose a professional decorative diffuser bottles manufacturer, Mosteb, in which to do the customized production of bulk bottles.
Client Background
The retailer came to Mosteb with the proposal of creating a unique 200 ml decorative diffuser bottle with a softly rounded square shape, light fluted vertical cuts on each side and a screw top of ceramic-effect Matte with an inner non-leakage insert.
Fluted pattern was adopted to improve the light reflection of shelves on retail stores and still have clean and contemporary look. The matte cap provided a contrast and matched the trends of minimalist branding of fragrances. They selected Mosteb due to our factory level customization of moulds, fixed bulk production control, and capability to match design fineness with cost effectiveness of distributing to dealer level.
Challenges
- Inconsistent dimensional accuracy affecting reed fit: The dealer used to source several small factories leading to incongruence in neck diameter. This made reed bundles to lie loosely, or caps to appear out of place, thus lowering the quality of product presentation by the retailers.
- European warehouse distribution has high breakage rates: Thin-walled bottles and traditional packaging resulted in observable breakages when stacking pallets and during transportation across the borders, which generated replacement costs and delays in logistics.
Cause Analysis
Our engineering department went through returned units and technical drawings and found two root causes:
- High-volume runs caused slight structural anomalies due to loose tolerances in the mould.
- Pallet compression pressure was not considered in the packaging design when the product was to be stored in a warehouse in multi-layers.
- In order to solve these problems we reconsidered the structural thickness balance, mold accuracy, and compression resistance of packaging.
Solution
- Re-designed the neck finish area; made it stricter in terms of tolerance to guarantee uniform reed and cap fit.
- Thickening of the wall in the high-stress zones with a significant benefit of not adding much weight.
- Optimized annealing cycles in order to minimize internal stress to enhance structural strength.
- Invented reinforced inner cartons that had high dividers density and enhanced guidelines of stacking pallets.
- Installed batch inspection of comparison with dimensional measurement records prior to shipment.
Result
The reed fitting was made stable in the customized ornamental bottles of diffusers, shelf presentation was better and the breakages were drastically reduced during the handling in the warehouse. The Porto dealer said that distribution operations were smoother and the retailer confidence increased and hence the repeat orders are higher in the same fiscal year.
