Value Engineering

The Creative team at Alexir were recently briefed by one of their customers to make palpable changes to an advent calendar format, by value engineering from the profile design right through to the printing and packing. The original design of the advent calendar had multiple challenges both in the pack format and in the packing. The fundamental issue with the pack format lay in its large footprint and it used a sizeable amount of folding box board, meaning it would not fit onto one printed sheet. This sometimes can lead to inconsistency of print colour and the graphic designers also struggled to maintain a ‘flow’ of creative artwork across the 3 individual print items.

Aside from the outer cover and the two inner packs, there were a further 12 board components that made up the two trays inside the inner packs which held the tea bags. On both the left- and right-hand side of the calendar, and unseen by the consumer, was a complex inner tray design with partitions and dividers to make it fit-for-purpose. This not only increased the amount of board, but it made the packing element a long and costly process. To add to the challenges, the tea bags would often get damaged inside the existing fitment.

In short, the new pack format would have to reduce the complexity of packaging elements and print items, reduce material, and reduce packing time.

Now that the outside cover had been simplified for the packing teams, it was key to find a solution to replace the 6 elements within each side of the calendar. Having explored various material options, it was decided to develop a bespoke thermoformed pulp tray with 15 cavities each, sized for two tea bags to sit in securely. Essentially the packing teams now only had to pack the tea bags into the two pulp trays, insert these into the main body of the calendar and seal the packs with a tamper-evident sticker. The simplicity of the erection and packing would dramatically increase the speed on the packing lines and would therefore decrease costs.