A flexible packaging company, using the speed and resiliency of digital printing, is opening a second location in Colorado and has eyes on even more sites.
Called ePac Holdings LLC, the company expects to have a new 14,000-square-foot facility open in Boulder this fall.
The company is employing the same approach in Colorado as was used to open its first location in Middleton, Wis., in April 2016.
Digital printing, Chief Marketing Officer Carl Joachim explained, allows ePac to target small-to-medium-sized businesses needing flexible packaging.
"Our strategic plan is to populate these ePac locations in up to as many as 15 locations around the United States. It's really just a question of which one goes next," Joachim said.
Colorado's interest in natural and organic foods as well as, yes, cannabis, helped the company select its second location.
"It's just a fast-growing market itself," Joachim said. "We just find it's a very underserved market when it comes to custom-made packaging.
"With those two markets in mind and with some analysis done, we felt that those two markets as well as the overall economic climate in Colorado, certainly in the Denver-Boulder area, was something that would carry us," he said.
Joachim's ePac is led by co-CEOs who have plenty of experience in the flexible packaging business — Jack Knott and Virag Patel. Knott is the former CEO of Coveris, and Patel is former vice president of global market development at the same firm. They both are with Joachim at Arion Partners LLC, an investment advisory firm based in New York that helped form ePac.
"As the epicenter of the natural/organic food market, and a vibrant cannabis industry, we are already working with local brands providing new packaging solutions and an alternative to packaging produced overseas," said Dustin Steerman, executive vice president of the Boulder operations, in a statement.
The company, thanks to the efficiencies of digital printing, can bring new packaging to market in just a few weeks for small and medium-sized businesses. But the firm also does work for larger customers.
A small production run is maybe 5,000 or 10,000 units. But ePac also has the ability to make much larger runs of similarly designed packaging with different graphics and SKUs for a single client.
"We've also got several really big companies that we're working with that we think we provide a niche to them that they just can't get from their traditional converters," Joachim said.
Larger consumer packaged goods companies can use ePac to create limited run packaging for special events or promotions, for example, he said.
The new Boulder location will have about 15 employees, Joachim said.
"We've seen tremendous market response to ePac's unique value proposition, which is built on providing a complete solution from prepress through converting. By providing turnaround time within 10 days for most jobs, and offering low minimum order quantities, we can offer our customers solutions that, until now, were just not available," Patel said in a statement.
