K-1 Packaging Is a One-Stop Shop for Customers

At times, the one-stop-shop's ability to offer customers a wealth of production options can foster the need to more actively manage customers' expectations. For instance, when a luxury fragrance customer wanted a carton design to incorporate a high-end, pearlescent embossed paper stock with limited availability in the United States and a problematically thin stock weight, K-1 solved the issue by incorporating a more commonplace paper stock and using multiple surface treatments—embossing applied on top of foil stamping, on top of micro texture coating, on top of printing ink, on top of pearl coating—to mimic the look and feel of the luxury paper. However, the first time around, Tsai reports, K-1 went through the first five processes successfully only to encounter failure at the final diecut process where the stress generated caused ink adhesion failure. The desired end-result was finally achieved after two weeks of additional application testing and a restart of the production process. "Such qualification has to be done empirically through extensive trials," he points out, "which is often time-consuming as well as costly." Customers typically willing to go to these lengths to differentiate are those whose products must convey luxury, or those with high-end products (such as a small candle) that don't occupy a lot of physical space and are thus dependent on the package to convey value.