Premium Beauty News - Not that easy today to be a producer of folding boxes in Europe and, on top of it, to still be a family owned business? What does Pusterla 1880 represent in 2013?
Guiseppe Meana - Not so simple, indeed! We must be vigilant on all fronts and, more specifically, on that of our production system. The challenges facing us are not simple. Competition is fierce, we have to keep our prices as low as possible, market requirements are important and we must constantly adapt ourselves.
For us this adaptation, as you know, started several years ago with the desire to be present industrially on the theatres of operation where we needed to be. Hence the successive acquisitions of the company Coffrets Création in 1999, located at the heart of France, then of Cazelles in 2009. Meanwhile we created from scratch in 2004 a factory in Romania, Dacica Teca to meet the increasingly important demand for handmade boxes. The objective of this whole strategy being to create complete and high quality products, by integrating as best as possible the expertise of the four companies under one brand name. The Pusterla 1880 group is now worth some 40 million euros in sales and employs around 240 people.
Yet this strategy of industrial integration is not sufficient. It was important to upgrade our whole production system in the four factories and fully optimize all production stages. It takes about one year for each production site. We are halfway through.
Premium Beauty News - What are the most important stages in this upgrade? Can you quantify the investment it represents?
Guiseppe Meana - It sounds simple but in fact it’s actually extremely complicated. Said “plainly”, it is all about reducing the time of going into production. This means optimizing the entire logistics of our plants and doing it consistently as we work more and more on a just-in-time basis. With the method we implemented, we are now capable of reducing this time for production start-up by nearly 15%. But this requires reorganizing production areas, the flow of raw material to machines, reconsidering work schedules, reorganizing the design and development departments, optimizing the relationship between the different plants we have in Europe etc.
An investment which is quite difficult to evaluate but that I estimate at nearly one million euros, apart from the investment in equipment, like this new technique that makes it possible to achieve in a record time the pp sample and to very quickly set machines.
To note that we have also acquired in our Italian factory two new die-cutting Bobst machines and a new machine for hot stamping.
Premium Beauty News - The beauty industry remains one of your main markets?
Guiseppe Meana - Yes it’s true, but both the wines and spirits, and especially the Champagne sector have sharply increased. So much so that our sales between the perfume/cosmetics and the wine & spirits sectors are balanced.
Premium Beauty News - While France meanwhile, remains your main customer country?
Guiseppe Meana - Yes, definitely. As it represents more than 60% of our turnover.
