Re/Defining luxury packaging with James Cropper

Our lives are inundated with different types of packaging materials – save for babies, puppies, and sunshine, virtually every aspect of our lives comes wrapped in plastic. And yet, we scarcely give this industry a second thought. Most of us are attracted to, repelled from, or have neutral feelings towards the visual aesthetics of the packaging our products come in. Occasionally, we consider its functionality (sports top or screwtop water bottle?). And there it ends. But stick a toe into the world of packaging design, and we will find that the amount of thought, effort, and innovation that goes into it is astounding – as are the multidisciplinary links across industries. There is no way out of packaging – we rely on products shipped to us from across the country and globe. Those products require protection and labelling. The challenge we face, then, is in reducing the amount needed and putting management practices in place to make it as environmentally friendly as possible. 

We have given quite a lot of thought to packaging challenges. In 2021, we began encouraging customers to go "one tin lighter”, making tin-less purchases the default preference on our online store and the visitor centre. By June 2022, we’d done away with tins for Bruichladdich and Port Charlotte core ranges. This progress was followed in 2023 with a redesign of The Classic Laddie bottle. The new bottle uses recycled material, specifically 60% recycled glass and is 32% lighter than its predecessor, significantly reducing fuel consumption in both manufacturing and transportation, thereby lowering its carbon footprint.

Once you step into the stream of innovation, a natural progression follows. When it was time to consider the design of the Bruichladdich Eighteen and Thirty, we knew the bottles needed to stand apart from the core range while staying true to the ethos of “use less, use better.” With the idea of a wrap in mind to replace the traditional tin, we turned to James Cropper to create something unique in style, luxury in feel, and sustainable at the core of its design. 

James Cropper began as a paper mill in 1845 in the Lake District. Still family-owned, six generations on, the business has a long history of innovations. From being one of the first to produce coloured paper from synthetic dyes to their research into no-cellulose fibres that are now known as 'James Cropper Advanced Materials' and are used globally in the Hydrogen, Aerospace, Defence and Medical industries. They have since gone on to create a cup cycling technology capable of recycling over 700,000,000 used coffee cups and the new moulded fibre packaging technology, COLOURFORM™. 

The company’s work includes creating bespoke packaging for thousands of brands from luxury drinks, watches, and cosmetics all the way down to liners for all sorts of products. Their driving mission is to create the same quality products using more sustainable solutions. COLOURFORM™, for example, is a thermoformed, moulded fibre packaging innovation by James Cropper. The fibre type is selected and made into a wet pulp, then moulded to the exact shape using heat and air. The technology opens the door for the replacement of plastic packaging by a wide array of fibres, many of which are acquired through a variety of waste streams, i.e. they take materials that would normally go to the landfill, process them and put them to new use. 

Packaging Designer Heather Allen says that although a number of companies offer moulded fibre packaging now, few offer colour matching to the degree that James Cropper does. This means that their clients can get the precise colour they require to match their branding. 

“A big drive for [COLOURFORM™] was a real move away from plastics and having a sustainable option,” says Global Sales Director, Gareth Fisher. “Having something different and iconic in the industry – so things like the B wrap – it really challenges what packaging norms are in certain areas. There’s been a lot of traction along the way as well in reducing carbon footprints. This product allows us to do that – creating a mono material that’s easily recyclable.” 

Two of the exciting areas James Cropper is exploring are the cup cycling program and the recycling of fibres from luxury clothing. The cup cycling program, commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II, has the company transforming McDonald’s discarded coffee cups into books that go into the Happy Meals. It’s a story of circularity: taking a company’s waste to create another product for them. 

“We’re looking at doing this with some luxury clothing brands with their waste,” explains Fisher. “Their clothing material – we can take the cotton fibres out of that, blend them, use the cotton fibres in our production process, and create a bespoke product for them.” 

James Cropper has six different streams they work with to source their materials, including office and mill waste, recycled cups, and virgin fibres. The material they select for each product’s packaging depends on the product type and requirements. There’s quite a bit of variation in fibre type, from short and long to hardwood and softwood fibres. Each fibre type has different qualities and characteristics; they’re often blended to get the perfect form, function, and aesthetic. 

Our Luxury Re/defined range required a material that was flexible enough to wrap around the bottle and have a clasp that could be opened and closed multiple times, but was sturdy enough to withstand transportation and use, all while maintaining a high standard of presentation. To meet this level of complexity, the company used a blend of virgin short and long fibres, sourced from Nordic mills.  

The choice of mill is conscious – their paper and pulp come from forests managed by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), regulating and supporting sustainable forest management. The FSC’s techniques are a model of sustainable forestry management, ensuring that natural resources are used responsibly for future generations. CO2 uptake is high in the young, fast-growing trees, but decreases in older trees, and every year the FSC plants more of these young trees than they harvest of the older trees. Nordic laws oversee this sustainable management, as Fisher explains: 

“You're not just allowed to chop it all down and then plant like you would a farm in rows of just trees. You have to put it back to its natural beauty with the right kind of trees in the right place. It's a big difference from what they will do in Asia and China and South America where you would see football pitch sizes, chopped down every five minutes. So, we know that when we're buying pulp from these places, it's managed in a very different way than some of the fibre that's available in the market.” 

Finding the right fibre blend was just one step of the package design process. Before they chose their material, they needed to get the design just right. They began with the concept of a wrap, but multiple iterations were needed to perfect the look and match it with functionality. Challenges marked the long path from concept to completion: matching the colour, getting the name positioned just right, and perfecting the metal tools that clamp around the mold, for example. But most challenging of all, Allen says, was fitting such a detailed amount of text onto the wrap.  

And then there was the clasp. It had to be designed for multiple uses, clicking into place over the mold without tearing or crumpling. Trimming the edge of the clasp down to give it a sleek look without compromising on its functionality posed quite the challenge and really pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible with molding. But as Allen says, “It's great to be a part of the process and pushing the boundaries. It’s one of the biggest things we like to do here at James Cropper.” 

The clasp also gives another sensory experience of the packaging. Not so long ago, several members of the marketing department sat around a table and spent half a day helping to put the wrap around the Bruichladdich Eighteen. When it was done just right, the clasp would give a click as it closed around the bottle. It’s one of those experiences so oddly satisfying, that throughout the morning whispered exclamations of “Yessss!” would bubble up from the group.  

That click was consciously designed. It was a lot of work to get the tooling just right to get that effect, but as Fisher says, “It's not just a wrap that goes round and we just stick that on. It's the feeling that you get when that noise, when it clicks in and you know the sound of the feel. Then it feels secure. It's locked. It's in place. It really engages as another touch point and steps it up a level from being simply a wrap just holding it in place.” 

With nearly 200 years of experience and a relentless drive for cutting-edge innovation and sustainability, James Cropper is well positioned to lead the packaging industry into the future. Along with their cup cycling program and investigations into recycling luxury clothing fibres, they’re exploring alternative types of fibres, such as coconut husk, hemp, pineapple and seaweed. The key is in finding fibres that add value to the paper product (through strength, for example) and can either be sustainably cultivated or, even better, taken out of a waste stream and put to new use.  

The results of this combination of innovation and design are some of the most eye-catching products on the shelf. “When it came to launching these prestige whiskies, we set out to prove that sustainable packaging can be simultaneously stripped back and beautiful,” says Gareth Brown, Bruichladdich’s Global Marketing Director. “Rather than adding elaborate packaging or unnecessary weight we have chosen to subtract, letting form follow function to rethink what modern luxury can, and should, be.” 

All of this progress is only possible because of the collaboration amongst businesses all focused on sustainable innovation: manufacturers and designers making conscious choices about where and how they source their materials; businesses seeking out values-aligned purveyors. And of course, all of this depends on consumers supporting those businesses. 

Global trade isn’t likely to decline anytime soon and neither is our need for packaging. Barring an apocalypse and a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we’ll be dependent upon our neighbours near and far for our consumables for a long time yet.  

So, the next time you make a purchase, whether it’s a single malt Scotch whisky or a new battery charger entombed in thick nigh-on indestructible plastic, think about all the connections that went into that packaging. How many human and ecological relationships were involved? How much of that packaging is even necessary, and how many positive human and ecological relationships can come out of the waste it produces? Like all of our relationships, the ones we choose to invest in are the ones that grow.