Success by Design
Early collaboration between printer and designer was key to the success of new Kleenex product packaging.
July 2010 By Chris Mc Loone
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Package design has become increasingly important to the success of a product. With all the visual noise customers face as they shop, a package must be distinctive, eye-catching, and, nowadays, useful to the customer beyond holding the goods purchased. It also must be able to be processed in packaging lines that often are not customized. Designing such packaging poses several challenges to designers everywhere and to the printers who furnish the materials to be run on the lines prior to shipment. Printers play an important role during this entire process.
Kimberly-Clark (K-C, Dallas) recently engaged Great Northern Corp. (Appleton, Wis.) to create a package for its new product, Kleenex® Hand Towels. The package for these hand towels contains 60 single-use, disposable paper hand towels. It doubles as a dispenser that can sit on a counter or towel bar. The product line is completely new and launched in March. The resulting design is due to close collaboration between K-C and Great Northern, which manufactures the cartons at its StrataGraph facility in Oshkosh, Wis.
Design criteria
Great Northern offers structural design services along with its printing capabilities. For this product, K-C designed the carton and the graphics, and Great Northern implemented them in the finished product, according to Andrew Bakken, technical leader, family care global growth for K-C. "We worked with Great Northern to prototype every aspect of the carton: inks, coatings, die lines, perforations, scoring, adhesives, and so on," he says. According to Don Schroeder, president, Great Northern, K-C was looking for something eye-catching and unique, and something that would provide secondary usage in its design. One aspect of the package is its rhombus shape. "This particular case is designed so it can set on a vanity when it is oriented with the point up," says Schroeder. "It can also be used with a towel rack with the point down. You tuck the box into the towel bar, and you can pull towels out one by one."
Bakken adds, "The carton was designed to be used either upright on the counter or upside down on a towel bar. We wanted to provide the towel right where the user needed it. We wanted the carton to fit into a bathroom décor so we chose colors that would match or coordinate with bathroom fixtures. The metallic finish and embossed pattern added to the 'fixture' look." Colors of the cartons include bronze, platinum, and aquamarine.
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Package Printing, Second Edition
