Adams Helps A Growing Candle Company Navigates GMI Printing Requirements

How do you adapt when your retail packaging requirements change dramatically when you start dealing with larger retailers?

One of Adams customers is a candle company. We first got to know them soon after a major retailer had agreed to stock their products. This was great news, but it also brought its own set of challenges. The agreement was a big step up for them, and they had to learn a new retail landscape quickly.

One of the major changes for the candle company was how to deal with their packaging manufacturing. The retailer insisted that their packaging conformed to GMI standards, to ensure consistent quality. This meant the company had to engage a new GMI-certified supplier and learn the whole GMI process.

The candle company researched a number of options. After reviewing their options they decided to work with Adams. They felt we had the best knowledge of the GMI process and were best placed to help them navigate this new landscape. This is partly down to the fact that we are one of only two accredited GMI high performance suppliers.

Making sure your packaging is GMI certified for the first time can be a complex process

Our customer had to go through a steep learning curve. The GMI website is highly complex and contains a lot of industry jargon. There is a highly involved process that both the client and the printing company have to go through in order to ensure that certification is obtained. Our customer admitted that they were completely lost to begin with!

Adams understands how new customers feel and the issues that they encounter. We have good experience of the process as we have helped so many other clients to ensure that their packaging becomes GMI certified. We were able to guide the candle company through the process. We made sure that they carried out everything correctly at their end. As with all our other clients, the packaging was swiftly certified as GMI compliant without any issues.

When you move to a large retailer, it’s not just GMI that you need to worry about

The original packaging design that the candle company were using wasn’t suitable for the automated packaging lines that were needed for the larger quantities that they were now required to produce. Adams helped them redesign the packaging so that automation could take place.

We were able to help with the testing process too. We created a wide variety of one-off and short run samples. This allowed rigorous trialling on the packaging line as well as a variety of tests to ensure good durability. Our client could also see exactly what the new packaging would look like. This was thanks to our color profiling system that allows us to be confident that our samples would match the production run exactly. This is something that many print suppliers cannot guarantee.

Adams brought some big cost advantages for our new client

Firstly, we helped ensure that the packaging process could be automated, reducing production costs for the candle maker. The client could also be confident that their pre-production samples would look and perform just like the main production run. There were no expensive reprints.

We also brought savings to the GMI process too. As we are an accredited GMI high performance supplier we were also able to eliminate GMI costs for repeat packaging runs. Most suppliers have to ensure packaging is re-certified every time.

If you’re creating GMI certified packaging for the first time, we’d love to help

We’ll take the complexity out of the process for you. And we are pretty confident that we’ll be able to help you improve your packaging in other ways as well.

Contact Don Benedict now. He will help you take the first steps in your GMI journey.