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customers expecting a luxury experience. Made of a lightweight natural wood with a piano-style finishing, plus a leather sleeve, the secondary pack is as much a presentation case as it is a protective vessel. “Secondary packaging ensures safe transport, but it is not only for transport,” Attar says. “For the SE85 product, each case contains a six-month course of supplements, so the purpose of the package is to keep the bottles and everything else in it for six months, perhaps even on display. … We made it rigid, so it can keep and protect the glass during storage and transportation. At the same time, it will be good looking and presentable when someone puts it in the bedroom or office.” Attar notes that among many of HEBE LIFE’s affluent customer base largely in the U.S. and the Persian Gulf region, health products like these are often given as gifts. The secondary package not only scores high from a presentation perspective when the high-end gift is given to a recipient, it also continues to beautifully display the product through the six-month life of the kit. The wood presentation cases are enclosed in more traditional recyclable shippers, but even these packs smack of luxury. Supplied by Wrapology, the heavy-gauge paperboard cartons are debossed and covered with a slick, black stock paper topsheet that’s printed black on black in UV ink, and also uses silver foil for the SE85 product logo. Meanwhile, the lower price point (per-unit) Core ASX product, sold as a single glass bottle with no presentation case, uses only the Wrapology heavy paperboard carton shipper as secondary packaging. This product’s shipper is also topsheet-covered and debossed, allowing it to stand out on a doorstep just like the pricier SE85 kit. Despite being decidedly high-end—to the point of shipping product in piano-finished wood—packaging to this point has been reasonably standard for both HEBE LIFE’s offerings. But at the shipper level, HEBE LIFE employs a unique printed seal, imbued with smart packaging characteristics via encrypted QR code and attendant software, that allows for all sorts of nifty features befitting expensive D2C nutricosmetic products.
Tamper evidence for nutricosmetics To scratch the authentication itch, Elshourbagy approached European specialty and secure label maker Eltronis with a problem in need of a solution. Initially, she was simply looking for a secure tamper-evident seal that would reliably adhere to the shipper—she had had some trouble with earlier tamper-evident seals and strips that hadn’t been able to adhere to the sleek printed carton. Eltronis
Watch this video on pharmaceutical traceability and DSCSA: hcpgo.to/dataexchange
solved that problem with a proprietary adhesive that cures on the carton in such a way that it allows for complete adherence prior to distribution, so the partnership was off to a good start. The basic goal of the seal, of course, was to provide customers the peace of mind that the supplements received were the real, authentic product from HEBE LIFE, and no tampering had occurred along the supply chain. But after some discussion about this underlying goal, Eltronis and Elshourbagy saw even more opportunity via Eltronis’ new engage™ cloud-based software intended to provide brands with a tool to link products to the internet through consumers’ smartphones. “Engage is the result of quite a lot of market-led innovation that we’ve done, and it’s evolved over time to where it is now,” says Pete Smallwood, Business Development Manager, Eltronis. “It came from some work that we did to help some of our pharmaceutical companies with the implementation of the Falsified Medicines Directive and our work with several governments looking at authentication labels. Alongside this we have worked with a number of global brand owners to develop the brand protection side of engage. And more recently, we’ve launched the marketing side as well. “Our focus has always been on having products which are accessible to customers and consumers and this is particularly so with engage. There are no barriers to entry and no CapEx involved for the brand owner. Consumers do not need to download any apps or software to use engage, they simply use their camera on a standard smartphone.” In the HEBE LIFE application, Eltronis’ engage seal is a circular label with adhesive only applied to its upper and lower quarters. A central band portion of the round seal remains adhesive free, intended to straddle the open gap between the side walls and top or cover panel of the paperboard carton shipper. The belly portion of the seal is die cut to create a tear strip that is printed underneath with additional information that remains hidden until the strip can be removed. The seal adheres to the side wall and top panel of the printed paperboard shipper to act, at its most basic functional level, as a physical tamper-evident indicator. When the tear-off strip is removed, the remaining top and bottom portions of the label remain adhered to the packaging. If the seal has already been broken, that tells consumers that the package has been compromised. Like the labels used on the glass jars, printing is done with such quality— including the HEBE LIFE logo using holography via rainbow cold foil—that counterfeit reproduction should be prohibitively difficult. The authentication process goes much further than top notch label design. Stay tuned for Part 2 covering HEBE LIFE’s QR codes and more in our next issue.
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