COSMETICS BUSINESS LIVE
It makes sense to keep the outer part of the packaging luxurious and glamorous, and then to make a very simple refilling system. Williams: Communication to your consumer is massively important, so that they know you (and they) are investing in this primary pack to do refills. They also need to know where they can get the refill, how it is going to work and why that fits in with the company’s values. Lockyer: We’re dealing with a diverse subject within a completely diverse industry. One scenario is where the at- home refill is the USP of the brand. For instance, we’ve worked with a company called Ethosa, where they sell a refillable aluminium can for a home shower gel product and we produce a sachet of powder that you pour into the can and mix with water at home – and all those elements add up to create that brand image. On the opposite extreme, when you’re working with a brand like Omorovicza where luxurious packaging is key to everything that they stand for, in that case we provide for one of their products – which is a beautiful jar of 60 cleansing pads – a refill pack and it’s very much a case of rip it open, take that new block of pre-dosed pads out and put it back into that beautiful, luxurious jar.
What about this milk round-style strategy, or the in-store returns for refill approach: what should brands bear in mind when considering that route? Williams: There are a lot of systems – Loop’s one, Beauty Kitchen is doing another – where you can take your bottle or jar back in and you can refill it. If you’re a mass brand and you’re doing a shower gel, or a body wash, or laundry, that makes sense, because they’re going to have the stock and it’s going to go through really quickly. But if you’re a premium skin care brand, unless you’ve got your own store, I think you’re going to find it tough. It can work, but you’ve then got to drive the right consumer behaviour. They’ve not only got to buy into that product in the first place, they’ve got to remember to take that product back into the store to do the refill. It’s similar to when you buy your ‘bag for life’ – I now own about 500 bags for life, because I forget. A lot of companies are doing the free post returns, which is fantastic, and that goes through and it gets washed out and then it gets put back into the supply chain,
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and that works really well. But there’s another issue to consider about the lining inside the bottles and how many times they can actually be washed out. Lockyer: Someone like Lush can do it quite well, where you go back in and you can cut your soap, or you can refill something. But I think it comes back to the fact that, if you’ve got a bricks-and- mortar store then you can definitely do something like that, but it does only really work for real mass volume products. You can’t have every single product – and, frankly, how does a consumer arrive into a store with every single piece of packaging they’ve got in order to refill?! So I think it’s always going to be niche to a certain extent, or only relevant to real high volume stuff. Beneyto: In this sense, e-commerce can help a lot. When you buy for the first time you can ask for the refill cartridge. You can even rely on reverse logistics, so at the same time you get a new refill, you just drop back the old one. So we’re not relying on the physical market itself for refills, but from those digital tools that we have currently got available.
How do you ensure a refillable outer pack is durable and desirable enough to last long term, while safeguarding against non-compliance if someone does throw it out? Beneyto: From the materials point of view, we’ve got some solutions for that. So for the outer jar, whether it’s luxurious, big, small or whatever, we are offering recycled products that can either contain PCR or PIR. More and more, specifically for skin care, acrylic and PET are the most common products that are available and they are serious in terms of aesthetics. So, in my opinion, this is currently not a problem.
Can you tell us what you think is the best refill solution? Lockyer: I think we’ve actually got to get away from saying ‘what is the best?’ because we all know the reality is there isn’t ‘the best’. What there is, is there are lots of options available to make a step forward in the right direction. To ask what can you, as a brand, do better than what you’re currently doing today? Because if you do something a little bit better, we will all make a step in the right direction
Cosmetics Business Live 2022’s refillable packaging panel included experts from Orean (a contract manufacturer), Faca Packaging and Sampling Innovations
December 2022 57
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