The eclectic closures for the Benefit B Right skin care line, designed by Maesa Studio, look like they are made from real cork.

Put a Lid on It

A necessary part of the package, innovative closures add value while maintaining function.

Written by Steve Katz, Associate Editor

No one is happy when a lid or cap comes off a product prematurely, and no one likes it when a product loses some of its contents—even if it’s a slow drip—before the container is called upon. This sentiment is applied universally. Whether for food, beverage, automotive, industrial, chemical or health and beauty, caps and closures play an important role.

A faulty closure can cause more than just an unexpected mess. In addition to wasting product, a cap mishap can also shake a consumer’s confidence in a brand they otherwise enjoy and would remain loyal to. While perhaps it’s not the first thing a consumer thinks about, the closure could be the last thing, when at the moment of purchase, they decide to go elsewhere because they remember that messy, wasteful experience.

But caps and closures—particularly in the beauty industry—are more than just a means of spill prevention and sealing. A beauty product’s package is often an artful display of a branded message, and caps and closures can provide another surface that can be embellished, as well as a means of adding value to the overall design.

Caps and closures are also necessary. With brands striving to be greener through minimizing packaging, some components have gone by the wayside in recent years. However, it’s difficult to do away with the cap.

A Growing Market

The caps and closures market is growing. According to the Freedonia Group, a publisher of industry market research and forecasts, demand for caps and closures in cosmetic and toiletry product applications is expected to increase 3.7% annually to $1.1 billion in 2014, aided by growing demand for personal care products and associated primary containers, most of which utilize closures.

“A rebound in consumer spending for discretionary items such as fragrances will also propel gains for related fragrance caps and sprayers.

Expanded product offerings targeted at narrower user groups such as ethnic consumers, nontraditional consumers (e.g., men), teens and babies will create additional opportunities for caps and closures. Additionally, gains will be assisted by the prevalence of value-added closures such as custom dispensing configurations, many of which utilize a second, protective overcap. Dispensing closures such as pumps, sprays, applicators and flip-tops are widely employed in a range of applications, including hair spray, shampoo and conditioner, styling aids, cosmetics, skin care products, soaps and hand sanitizers,” the Freedonia Group reports.

Advances in caps and closures are also expected to be driven by the proliferation of fragrance samplers, which often use value-added components. Plastic sample vials are widely used in the fragrance market to introduce new products and encourage trials of existing ones. In addition, the Freedonia Group reports that value growth will be helped by the need for more costly child-resistant packaging. In 2002, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) expanded the range of products requiring child-resistant packaging to include items that contain 10% or more hydrocarbons by weight, including mineral oil-based cosmetics such as hand and face creams, suntan lotions, bath and baby oils, and nail enamel drying agents.

“Some producers changed the formulation of certain products to make them exempt from these regulations by reducing the hydrocarbon content or making the products more viscous. However, the CPSC’s ruling has inevitably expanded the presence of child-resistant closures on many cosmetic and toiletry items,” the Freedonia Group reports.

While unit demand for caps and closures in the cosmetic and toiletry market is forecast to rise 2.1% annually to 19 billion units in 2014, helped by the rising use of trial-size containers of lotions, shampoos and other products in hotels, spas and hospitals, travel restrictions will also play a role. “Unit growth will be stimulated by airline security regulations requiring carry-on toiletries to be packaged in containers of three ounces or less, a move that has led many personal care product manufacturers to make adjustments in their packaging or boost production of items in trial-size containers,” the firm says. “Unit gains will be moderated by saturation in markets such as hair care, oral care, and soaps and body washes.”

Innovative Design

Suppliers of lids, caps and closures know that these components provide an area for product embellishment and added value, while also performing an integral function. And like other areas of a beauty product’s package, the types of closures can change with the trends and fashions of the day
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The intricate cap for Givenchy’s Play for Her, from Axilone USA, features decorative pearls.

Hubert Allain, project manager, Axilone USA, notes a few trends in the closures market. “Transparency is a big trend, as is combining metal and plastic, and innovative design,” he says, pointing to examples such as Play for Her from Givenchy, and the new Michael Jordan Flight. “New ways of opening and handling, or using the products, are a means of differentiating from the bulk of the market. Smaller and easier to carry packages are also increasingly present,” he says.

In regard to the design—and feel—of the Five Star Michael Jordan Flight package, unique is the operative word. “The bottle is dressed with two ‘grips’ that give the package a very unique look, in addition to the decoration done on the bottle itself,” Allain explains. “It also provides protection for the bottle, because those parts are made of an elastomeric material—if you drop the bottle, either part exposed to the shock (cap or grip) is flexible enough to absorb the shock and protect it. The rubber also provides a soft-touch feeling, which is also a trendy finish on cosmetic packages,” he says.

For the Givenchy Play for Her package, three sizes were done by Axilone, who added a co-polyester to the product’s bulk. “Also, the outline band—with the decorative pearls—required an intricate tool with complex kinematics to eject the parts out of the cavities,” says Allain. “This part is molded in ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), and then electroplated. An inner PP was designed to allow a robust assembly between the body of the package, the vial and the outline band all together.”

Specific, specialized design sometimes calls for extensive investigation of materials. “For the Five Star Michael Jordan Flight package, we had trials on more than 15 materials and blends to finally select the best compromise between marketing constraints and the functions needed—elasticity and flexibility, compatibility to the bulk, fit on the glass, color, etc.,” Allain says.

With transparency being a trend, some designs present challenges in achieving the mass and transparency requested by the customer. “Take the Dior Homme fragrance Surlyn cap developed a few years ago, for example. This is 72 grams with one shot of Surlyn bi-injected with a PP inner for the fit on the pump. The design calls for a lot of technical complications: long cycle time due to the mass of the cap, extra cooling after injection, and a lot of potential aesthetical defects due to the complexity of the part,” Allain says. “In addition, Surlyn is a hard material to process and is a challenge to run in a lot of cases, even if the design is not such a challenge in itself.”

Closure Convenience

There’s something to be said for the “added value” that a user-friendly, convenient, packaging component provides. Here, if you can give the consumer what they want, you’re a step ahead of the competition.

And with a focus on convenience, Aptar is launching a 70mm hinged jar lid to its Symphony family of closures. “This new dispensing jar lid provides the ultimate in consumer convenience,” says Erin Ryan, market development director-personal care NA, Aptar Beauty + Home. She adds, “We’ve completed many consumer tests, including in-home use, that showed the consumer prefers this new platform to traditional non-dispensing jar lids.”

The new, hinged lid allows for easy access and less mess than twist-off jar lids. “The consumer concern with traditional twist-off jar lids is where to put the jar lid once it is open to use product, such as on the counter or shower floor—it’s very inconvenient. Then, once you need to close it, most consumers have residual product on their hand and it gets on the lid when they replace it, making a messy package.” Ryan says Aptar’s hinged jar lids solve these two concerns.”

Other features of Aptar’s new lid include a secure sealing system, wide-mouth opening for quick, clean access, and an ergonomic finger recess for easy opening. Ryan adds that the lid is an ideal fit for thicker hair and skin care formulations. It’s also customizable, allowing for a brand’s logo to be inserted on the lid.

Keeping with the Theme

A packaging designer’s challenge is to develop and execute closure concepts that retain function, while maintaining the theme of the overall package. Maesa Group provides a few recent success stories.

Maesa Packaging’s custom Surlyn cap for the Oscar de la Renta Espirit fragrance is unique in how it “plays with light.”

Maesa Studio won the HBA IPDA Best Luxury Skincare category for the Benefit B Right skin care line, which was launched this year. “The idea was to conceive a package that flows with the thematic ingredients of the formulations, such as kelp,” explains Scott Kestenbaum, senior vice president at the Maesa Group. “The packaging speaks to an old world aesthetic of a vintage shipwreck bottle. Maesa designed the closures to be as special and eclectic as the rest of the bottle. The closures were meant to look like they were made out of real cork. In researching the best decorating technique to achieve this effect, Maesa Packaging used a hydrographic technique to impart the cork graphics onto the 3D surfaces of the cap without any seam lines.”

Maesa Group also designed and manufactured Oscar de la Renta’s new Esprit fragrance. To capture the renowned elegance of the brand, Maesa Studio set out to design a closure that is relatively simple in form, but distinguished in its materiality. “Our designers wanted to play with light,” Kestenbaum says. “In order to do that, we needed to craft a Surlyn cap with areas of heavy, thick walls. When you hold up the cap and look at it sideways, you can see the pools of Surlyn bending the light in an interesting way. Maesa Packaging supplied the custom cap, which also features a zamac collar with Oscar De La Renta’s name engraved. The thick Surlyn walls made the cap challenging to manufacture, with a gram weight of 45 and a cycle time exceeding three minutes,” Kestenbaum says.

Closure designs for the mass beauty market are not to be overlooked. Payless Brash Fragrance cap, designed by Maesa Studio, is a nice example of how to bring design and materials to set a very high bar for mass market fragrance that retails for $19.99, Kestenbaum says. “Maesa Studio designed the custom molded Surlyn cap to be adorned with an inset zamac placard. Each cap was also decorated with a custom zamac namesake charm,” he says.

250 Billion Closures

More than 250 billion plastic closures are produced globally each year, yet recycling rates for these products remain very low, according to the Closure and Container Manufacturers Association (CCMA). With brand owners and consumers constantly looking for more responsible packaging use and disposal/recycling options, the recycling of plastic and metal closures is now a major strategic focus for CCMA. Addressing these concerns and more will be a featured topic at the organization’s upcoming 2011 Annual Conference and Meeting to be held September 12-14, at the Westin Atlanta Airport.

The association’s new Sustainability Initiative, launched in early 2011, aims to establish an improved recycling stream for caps and closures. The new strategy will look to open new outlets for PP container recycling with the help of major consumer product companies.

CCMA’s September conference will feature presentations from recycling value stream leaders, tracking the collection, recovery, separation and ultimate potential end use and application of the recycled materials. The program will cover:

• Challenges of collecting and recycling of closures
• Discuss a “day in the life of cap/closure” recycling and what happens throughout the life cycle journey
• Focus on new products that improve the recyclability of closures, examples of material reduction without sacrificing performance
• Market/consumer perspectives, trends and best practices on sustainable packaging now and in the future.

“One of the most challenging and confusing issues confronting the worldwide packaging industry is what to do with the over 250 billion caps/closures once they are separated from containers,” says Roy Robinson, chairman of CCMA’s board of directors. “Lack of knowledge, information and collaboration on all of the issues surrounding their recyclability has compelled CCMA to take ownership of this challenge. Our goal is that the time, effort and money CCMA members are dedicating to this initiative works to the benefit of its members addressing not only the economics, but the bigger issue of protecting the planet’s precious resources.”