Sister Companies Get the Packaging Job Done Right

By Janet Herlihy, Editor

Brad-Pak Enterprises Inc. and Pride-Pak Inc. are sister companies, working hard to provide specialized products and services to the cosmetic, fragrance, personal care, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Located in Garwood, NJ, the two companies bring a “can do” attitude to solving their customers’ packaging problems.

Founded by Vince Brady, president, Brad-Pak is a distributor of a wide variety of packaging: glass, plastic and aluminum containers, closures and pumps. Brady has a long history in packaging, starting in 1958 and working for various distributors and manufacturers of glass, plastic and aluminum containers as well as closures and dispensers. During his career, he gained first hand experience in many molding processes used in the manufacture of cosmetic, fragrance and personal care packaging. In 1983, Brady decided to take his extensive experience in the packaging markets and form Brad-Pak.

Brad-Pak is a full-service provider of packaging needs, offering decorating and package engineering services as well as containers. In 1992, Brady was joined in the family business by his son Jim, who serves as general manager and handles the day-to-day operations. Vince’s daughter, Jenifer Brady, came on board in 1993 as vice president of sales and marketing. Gloria Schlesinger, customer service manager, brought her extensive packaging experience to the Brad-Pak team last fall. Previously, she spent 10 years as customer service manager with The Foster Forbes Glass Company, a division of National Can, and over 16 years with W. Braun Company, where her last position was corporate director of customer service.

The close knit staff divides its efforts between several market segments. One of the company’s major categories is the fragrance industry, which comes to Brad-Pak for bottles used in research and development. The company’s True-Pour line of amber bottles with UV protection and a lip built into the bottle for pouring, are recommended for use in research and development.

A variety of finished goods marketers in cosmetics and personal care shop from the company’s line of plastic, glass and aluminum bottles. Brad-Pak owns several private molds at a major glass manufacturer that are available for its customers exclusively. Its high-end line of aluminum containers are available in sizes ranging from 10ml to 35 liters and are recommended for the shipment and storage of precious ingredients such as essential oils. The development of custom sizes and shapes in aluminum are also offered, which the company provides to the pharmaceutical industry as well.

Customer Service First

“We are service and knowledge oriented for our customers—big or small,” stressed Vince Brady.

“It can be very difficult for someone, who has a great new product, to figure out how to package it and take it to market,” explained Schlesinger. “Many packaging suppliers have large minimum orders that are prohibitively expensive. It’s hard to just buy 5,000 containers, but we order the minimum number and then stock the products in our warehouse space so we can sell small lots to our customers,” she said. Brad-Pak is also happy to share its industry know­ledge with its customers. Schlesinger said, “We’ll help them get started anyway we can.”

“A lot of the new, small companies are niche marketers,” observed Vince Brady, “and our advantage as a distributor is being able to pool the needs of smaller companies to keep them supplied with what they need.

“Brad-Pak can produce a ‘complete’ package—they (clients) can choose a bottle, we’ll help them develop the package and provide decoration and labeling services,” he explained. “We can supply the advantage of doing the total job. We even offer engineering services.”

Alliance Brings More Services

Once a customer has worked with Brad-Pak to develop a new package, the company is far from finished. It can decorate and label the container and, through its alliance with Pride-Pak, arrange to place the formula in bottles. Pride-Pak can also hand-assemble several items in a gift pack, store the items and then distribute them as needed.

Pride-Pak, located just down the street from Brad-Pak, is headed up by Richard A. Lant, president, and Roger Salvati, vice president of operations. Both executives had extensive experience in the cosmetic and personal care business when they came to Pride-Pak in 1995. Lent served as director of package engineering for Chanel for 13 years. Prior to that, he held a similar position at Charles of the Ritz. Salvati began his cosmetic packaging career in quality assurance with Revlon where he worked for six years. He then moved to Chanel in a similar position for 13 years. Salvati last served Chanel in manufacturing for over three years.

Pride-Pak works as a subcontractor to help marketer firms with all sorts of tasks that require hand labor, including inspection and assembling, handling returns, distribution and filling. When Cosmetic Packaging & Design visited the operation, crews were working on several projects at various stations set up in its 35,000 square foot facility. The company has a core group of about 30 employees working full time but when things get busy, as many as 70 are available for projects.

One group was busy “packing out” or putting together sets of personal care products that would eventually be sold through a high-end designer retail chain. Another group unwrapped, inspected, cleaned and polished a shipment of prestige compacts that had been rejected by the marketer for having smudges or scratches. Rather than ship the compacts back to the overseas supplier, the marketer chose to have Pride-Pak handle the problem. The company’s crew carefully checked each and every compact, polishing those with marks, rewrapping those that would now pass the company’s standards and sending them back. Compacts with permanent flaws were separated to be returned to the manufacturer.

“We realize we can’t be all things to all customers, so we cater to high end brands,” explained Lant. “We provide all kinds of services, even things like tying a bow on a package. It’s usually more cost effective for a marketer or supplier to have us do it than move the components around and have their own staff do it.”

When a customer asked if Pride-Pak could help with a fragrance filling job, the company invested in the equipment to necessary to handle small batches.

Being able to fill comparatively small quantities allows marketers to respond quickly to orders from their customers without keeping large inventories, Lant explained.

The handling and processing of returns from retailers can be a logistical nightmare for marketers. Salvati explained that at the end of the selling season, product still on the shelves goes back to the marketer for credit. But each piece must be logged into the marketer’s computer system, inspected, sometimes rewrapped or repackaged for resale and sometimes returned to the marketer for other disposal.

Pride-Pak is currently handling all such returns for one prestige company. Palettes of boxes filled with returns are shipped to Pride-Pak where they are opened and each piece is entered into a computer linked to the marketer’s system. A control number lets the marketer know a return has been received. Then each item’s bar code, which identifies the product and retailer, is entered.

A Pride-Pak employee inspects every item so that each can be accounted for. Every return is credited to the retailer, but those that are not suitable for resale are disposed of, while the perfect products are collected and sent back to the marketer.

“By mid-March, Pride-Pak had processed 117 palettes containing over 30,000 returned items for one marketer,” Salvati said.

The company is also able to handle distribution functions. One supplier to drug stores has contracted with Pride-Pak to distribute its mass market fragrance line. Some of the products come to Pride-Pak already packaged; others must be assembled. Salvati noted, “We receive it, hold it here in New Jersey and then ship it wherever they want it to go.”

Being flexible and responsive to each client’s needs is important. “We try to have diversified services so that as the market ebbs and flows, there’s always something going on that we can help with,” Lant stressed. “We would take on almost any project that required hand work or assembly. Each project is different and we give each customer what they need.”