Ambrosia Services

How Board Helped Hair Product

Aug 12, 2006
Official Board Markets
With a history of successfully developing and marketing ethnic beauty products such as hair and scalp treatment conditioners, braid relief sprays, and hair relaxers, Dr. Miracle’s has built a reputation within the ethnic hair care segment for creating consumer friendly hair products and in showcasing those products in packaging true to their natural brand.

Last year the company introduced a new No-Lye Relaxer targeted to African-American women looking for an effective and comfortable alternative to traditional hair straightening products that contain lye.

In preparing to launch one of the first-in-the-category hair relaxers packaged in a folding carton, Dr. Miracle’s had wanted to wrap the No-Lye Relaxer in a package that would feature highly detailed graphics. The company had two goals for the external packaging: to maintain the brand’s all-natural, “home-grown” image and to present the life-like graphics incorporated into the design in eye-catching color.

Drastically Different--
“We knew we were going to need something drastically different from the one- and two-color cartons we’d produced in the past,” says Ollie Johnson, executive vice president and co-founder of Dr. Miracle’s. “We wanted to keep the ecologically friendly look of kraft, but as with any of our beauty products, we wanted the packaging to display beautiful women using our hair relaxer—a graphic quality we were unsure we could achieve on the kraft-colored chipboard we’d previously used.”

The company turned to Frank Altomare, an independent manufacturer’s representative, who recommended MeadWestVaco’s Kraftpak® natural brown virgin fiber paperboard as the solution to its problems.

“The challenge was finding a substrate that would maintain the home-spun brand image of Dr. Miracle’s while providing superior printability and runnability,” he states.

He advised that inherent color variation and substantial dust byproduct made most uncoated products inappropriate for the high-end printing machinery that would be used to produce the cartons. But this wasn’t true with Kraftpak.

“It’s uniform, provides excellent printability and, like an SBS without the coating, is cleaner when running through the printing press,” he says. “Additionally, printing high-end graphics directly on corners that would eventually be folded required a board that allowed little to no cracking on the fold.”

Let’s Do a Test Run--
To convince the executives at Dr. Miracle’s that Kraftpak would not only perform well through the converting process but also yield eye-catching graphic detail, Altomare turned to Don Schroeder and his team at Great Northern Corp.’s Oshkosh, Wis.-based Stratagraph operation. The Stratagraph product line uses a UV-based dry trapping ink process to achieve graphic color and detail. Altomare convinced Dr. Miracle’s to produce a few test runs using this process, which he saw as the next generation of printing.

“A normal sheet substrate process—wet ink on top of wet ink—makes printing lifelike graphics on an uncoated substrate nearly impossible,” says Schroeder, Stratagraph’s president. “Our in-line process lets us print the silhouette of the image in one color—in this case white—to seal the uncoated board, and then print the remaining colors, all in one pass. This allows us to produce graphics with brilliant whites and skin tones, which enables Stratagraph to stand out boldly from other printers.”

With the carton now appearing on shelves in Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s, Sally Beauty Supply, and over 5,000 other beauty and barber supply stores across the country, the reaction from both the public and the health and beauty product industry has been tremendous.

“We have had numerous responses from our customers and our peers commenting on the package quality and how well it matches our company’s messages of being natural, ecologically friendly and, perhaps most importantly, effective,” says Johnson.

Dr. Miracle’s was so impressed with Kraftpak’s graphic reproduction that it chose to use it to create its point-of-purchase displays and shelf talkers as well.“This project was a winner for everyone involved, and demonstrates Kraftpak’s advantage in high-end, high quality printing applications that require a natural or environmentally friendly image,” says Kathy Singletary, Kraftpak sales manager.

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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 5:59 PM