Gérard Mathieu, Marketing & Innovation Director, Smurfit Kappa

Fitments were put forward on the Smurfit Kappa stand at Luxe Pack Monaco. The corrugated board specialist (45,000 employees and 370 sites in 34 countries) relies on the experience in luxury fitments of their SIEMCO site based near Nantes, France, to support perfumes & cosmetics brands with their developments. “We aim to help them maximize the customer experience, but also control costs and environmental impacts,” explains Gérard Mathieu, Marketing & Innovation Director.

Luxury Perfume Box Fitments Masterclass

To support this strategy, Smurfit Kappa has just developed an interactive digital tool intended to train customers and better determine their needs. Showcased as a world premiere at Luxe Pack Monaco, this “Masterclass – Luxury Perfume Box Fitments” is a concrete, entertaining way to boost brand image: customer experience maximization, cost reduction throughout the supply and manufacturing chain, production and logistics risk control, optimum product protection and presentation. And all this follows the principles of a sustainable development strategy.

These Masterclasses help explore all possibilities,” Gérard Mathieu emphasizes. “They are both a training tool and an instrument to communicate with customers, and they help work on their needs in practical terms, following an approach consisting in calculating the overall cost.

Thanks to a powerful simulation tool, Smurfit Kappa can integrate many parameters to choose the best fitment solution. From a marketing angle, the impact of the choices on consumers’ perception of the packaging volume, or on the coherence between the different capacities offered in the range can be instantaneously visualized. From the cost angle, beyond merely taking into account the costs of the material and fitment manufacturing, the cost of the final assembly, and even the environmental impact, can be integrated to the project.

As regards the environmental impact, the tool developed by Smurfit Kappa makes it possible to take into account about ten eco-design criteria (material consumption, logistics flows, recycling, end-of-life, etc.).

Other parameters involving complementary know-how offered by the Smurfit Kappa group may be added to take into account issues related to production, logistics, or distribution, in particular in e-commerce.

Experience Centre

This “Masterclass – Luxury Perfume Fitments” is accessible at the Experience Centre in Saint-Mandé, east of Paris. Smurfit Kappa has been welcoming customers since April 2016 for working sessions on their needs in packaging and PLV cardboard.

To the group, which covers all segments in fields like consumer goods, agri-food, or luxury products, the idea is not only to showcase their broad offering, but also to better support their customers. “The Experience Centre is much more than a mere showroom,” Gérard Mathieu emphasizes. “It makes it possible for us to have a real dialogue with brands, provide a real marketing service, and position ourselves as real packaging experts.

The Experience Centre is used to expose all Smurfit Kappa packaging solutions, but also to accelerate the development process, by reducing the number of models and pre-tests required. In terms of merchandising, pre-series and tests in stores are no longer necessary, thanks to a mini-store featuring a virtual reality area that provides 3D simulations of all product and packaging combinations possible.

By giving access to most Smurfit Kappa’s cross-cutting skills, and by combining a varied expertise, these new tools help support the group’s customers in optimally boosting their brand image and reducing time-to-market. And all this includes sustainable development!