Facing Up to Coding in the Cosmetics Industry

The cosmetics sector is one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, with projected revenues of $243bn in 2013, increasing on average three percent a year since 2008, a trend that is expected to continue for the next five years. However, in an increasingly competitive global market, manufacturers are looking for ways to help their product packaging stand out on store shelves. A magazine spoke to Lindsay Galas, Cosmetics Industry Marketing Manager at Videojet Technologies to explore how thermal ink jet solutions help cosmetics companies customize their packaging, while boosting manufacturing flexibility and productivity.

• What are the key trends in the cosmetics industry?

The cosmetics industry is both image and innovation driven, with manufacturers continually working to make their products stand out in the eyes of consumers. It has become more globalized over the last few years, increasing competition for sales, making it more important than ever to create and highlight brand differentiation through a number of techniques.

For example, to draw consumer attention, more and more cosmetics manufacturers are promoting their use of natural or organic ingredients in their products with key messaging on the sides of their packaging. Increasingly, this ‘eco-friendly’ strategy necessitates the use of more sustainable packaging formats, such as easy-to-recycle glass or plastics, or even the use of lightweight refill sachets or packs to reduce fuel consumption during transit from the production line to the supermarket.

To stand out on store shelves, cosmetics manufacturers are looking more at the design of their packaging. Over the last few years, as well as the increased use of custom molds to create striking container shapes, the industry has begun to take advantage of innovative metallic and other inks and seamless screen printing to enhance packaging decoration. This not only provides greater shelf presence in the retail space, it also has the effect of encouraging end users to keep the product out on display in the home, ensuring key brand messages continue to be conveyed after sale.

• What challenges does the industry face?

The increase in product variety and the growth of "limited edition" product releases among high-end cosmetics brands to draw a broader range of consumers has made it more important than ever before for manufacturers to enhance production line flexibility. This has led to renewed demand for machinery that allows fast product changeovers with minimal downtime to cope with short product runs without impacting productivity.

In addition, a rise in the instance of unauthorized and counterfeit goods on the market, as well as a number of high-profile product recalls due to contamination, recently is forcing manufacturers to look for ways to effectively track their products through the supply chain. A growing number are achieving this traceability through coding systems, and they are increasingly relying on advanced technology to ensure codes are clear and legible to partners further down the supply chain.

• How can the industry address these difficulties?

The issue of counterfeiting has led a growing number of cosmetics manufacturers to turn to comprehensive coding solutions for their product packaging. Recent innovations mean that coding machines can now do much more than simply printing lot numbers. Their advanced software enables manufacturers to enhance traceability on their production lines, allowing them to be tracked through the supply chain from the factory to the retailer. It does this by recording the lot numbers of each product as it passes through each checkpoint on the production line, offering code assurance to ensure brand protection.

Manufacturers are also seeking out coding technologies that facilitate straightforward product changeovers to minimize production downtime, addressing manufacturers’ requirements for production line flexibility. Systems capable of printing codes for a range of products can allow the manufacture of multiple short product runs for limited edition and seasonal collections on the same line, optimizing productivity and meeting fluctuating market demand without having to construct costly new production lines.

Increasingly popular among manufacturers are innovative coding and marking systems able to print lot numbers clearly in the same position on the product every time. Technologies capable of printing on a variety of packaging formats are also highly sought after to enable manufacturers to take advantage of new materials to help them to stand out next to competing products.

To achieve these multiple aims, technologies, such as thermal ink jet solutions, are becoming more widely used in the cosmetics industry. A non-contact coding technique, thermal inkjet system use heat and surface tension to move ink onto the package material. This highly flexible technology allows the printing of high-precision 2D DataMatrix and other bar codes at high speeds on a variety of packaging materials, including cartons and blister packs. Such solutions can ensure that every code is clear and legible to satisfy retailer demands and allow manufacturers to comply with industry regulations without impacting the look of the packaging on store shelves.

• What does the future hold for the cosmetics industry?

The cosmetics industry is set to enjoy robust growth over the next few years, leading to increasingly complex global supply chains, with products manufactured more and more in different countries from where they are sold. This means it will become ever more important for the industry to tackle the problem of product counterfeiting, so we can expect an increase in the use of coding technologies capable of advanced track and trace on cosmetic production lines in the coming years.

We can also expect the range of packaging formats and materials used by the cosmetics industry to continue to expand into the near future, as manufacturers seek to create stand out for their products in an increasingly crowded retail space. Coding technologies capable of printing legibly on a variety of materials at high speeds will become ever more important to ensure manufacturers are able to achieve their traceability goals.

Furthermore, as manufacturing costs are expected to remain high for the foreseeable future, production line flexibility will remain crucial to manufacturers as they seek to compete with a broader range of products and meet consumer demand with existing production lines. New coding and packaging technologies, that enable shorter product runs and that are capable of facilitating speedy product changeovers, will allow manufacturers to meet these requirements and will therefore grow in importance over the next few years.

Forward-thinking coding solutions, such as thermal ink jet, can enable manufacturers to meet these multiple trends in the cosmetics industry. By making use of such innovative systems, cosmetics manufacturers can ensure they are able to respond to changes in market demand well into the future.

About the Author:

Lindsay Galas is Cosmetics Industry Marketing Manager at Videojet Technologies. Through her work, she visits cosmetic manufacturers globally to better understand their processing and coding challenges and improve marking and coding solutions for the industry

About Videojet:

Videojet Technologies is a world-leader in the product identification market, providing in-line printing, coding, and marking products, application specific fluids, and product life cycle services. Our goal is to partner with our customers in the consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical, and industrial goods industries to improve their productivity, to protect and grow their brands, and to stay ahead of industry trends and regulations. With our customer application experts and technology leadership in continuous ink jet (CIJ), thermal ink jet (TIJ), laser marking, thermal transfer overprinting (TTO), case coding and labeling, and wide array printing, Videojet has more than 325,000 printers installed worldwide. Our customers rely on Videojet products to print on over ten billion products daily. Customer sales, application, service, and training support is provided by direct operations with over 3,000 team member in 26 countries worldwide. In addition, Videojet’s distribution network includes more than 400 distributors and OEMs, serving 135 countries.