Being previously involved in the commercial printing industry, Campbell says he fell into the bagmaking business more by accident than any sort of plan—originally motivated solely by finding new ways to keep his two printing presses active.
PRESS RUN
“About two-and-a-half years ago, I was approached by a company about making luxury paperbags,” he recalls. “I knew I could print them with our lithographic presses, and figured I could outsource the folding and gluing to someone local.
“So imagine my chagrin after making a number of phone calls and discovering that all the luxury paperbags were being hand-folded in Asia,” Campbell relates, adding that he became “obsessed” with figuring out a cost-effective way to perform the folding mechanically on a high-speed machine.
With typical luxury paperbag averaging about 17 folds apiece, Campbell knew he had his work cut out.
“After hand-cutting hundreds of shapes, I was finally satisfied that a fold pattern could be made automatically,” Campbell relates, “so my next challenge was to find a company to build a custom-made machine to meet my criteria.”
While the first machine delivered to Campbell turned out to be a dud, “because it did not function consistently,” he ultimately found what he was looking for after hooking up with the Toronto-based packaging machine-builder Pack-Smart Incorporated, which specializes in the assembly of custom-built packaging systems for unorthodox applications by using the so-called “best-of-breed” automation devices and components.
“In order for us to provide the perfect machine for our customers, we work quite closely with them and get feedback on the design, affordability and sustainability to ensure our quality matches the quality the customer expects,” explains Pack-Smart president Derek Dlugosh-Ostap, adding the company places extra emphasis on designing machinery to work with the more sustainable and eco-friendly materials such as PLA (Polylactic Acid) plastics and post-recycled paperboards.
“Moreover, our systems are governed by state-of-the-art electronic gearing technologies to reduce energy consumption by an approximate factor of two,” says Dlugosh-Ostap, explaining that the company’s multi-axis systems drastically improve energy conservation through the use of regenerative braking systems, which use kinetic heat energy to return energy to the power supply.
Campbell says he was sold on the merits of the PackSmart machine almost immediately after seeing it fold a single piece of paper 19 times during a test run.
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