Kickstart: Taking out the fashionable trash

Can fashion help sell plastics?

No, I don't mean the recent viral moment of socialite Kim Kardashian wearing caution tape film emblazoned with the name of luxury fashion house Balenciaga. Instead I'm looking at a move by consumer brand Glad to use fashion in marketing its ForceFlexPlus trash bag, a pink, cherry blossom-scented bag.

As Keira Wingate, a reporter with our sister paper Advertising Age, puts it, the marketing team wants to set up the Glad products — owned by Clorox Co. — as making "the most extra trash bag ever."

"The 30-second video shows an over-the-top fete attended by glammed-up revelers," Wingate writes. "A woman in a couture pink dress carries the bag around the house collecting leftover food and decor as the high-fashion party-goers take in the cherry blossom scent. Finally, the host goes outside to toss the waste, looking fantastic as her schlubby neighbor looks on, grasping his leaky, stinky, boring white plastic sack."

The cherry blossom bags are targeting sales to millennial women who "want to live the 'extra' life," the company said. (I'm not a millennial, but I've got to say ... really?)

Mexico's biggest plastics trade show, Plastimagen, is underway in Mexico City with 400 exhibitors. The 2022 show should be a marked recovery for an event that was postponed in 2020 because of COVID, then had much of its plans for 2021 shunted to virtual meetups.

RadiciGroup, the Italy-based materials company, recently moved into bigger headquarters in Ocotlán, Mexico, and is showing off its capabilities during the show.

"Significant investments have already been made in a new project to achieve a further increase in capacity in 2022 that will help meet the growth in demand and take advantage of the opportunities offered by an extremely dynamic market," Gianluca Cesco Frare, Mexico country manager for RadiciGroup High Performance Polymers, said in a news release marking the start of Plastimagen.

Meanwhile, StackTeck Systems Ltd. is showing its in-mold labeling automation system with injection molded cups in a live demonstration at the show at Avance Industrial's booth.

The labels for the project are provided by MCC Verstraete and will feature metallic finishes as well as a digital watermark technology, StackTeck said.

It's a diamond anniversary celebration for Flambeau Inc., an injection molder, blow molder and mold maker that has come a long way since its founders built a garage-sized building to house an injection molding machine made by their father.

Ole Sauey had experience as a tool and die maker, which William "W.R." and Edwin Sauey took advantage of as they built a company named for the nearby Flambeau River in 1947.

"The brothers were soon manufacturing useful and successful products, such as a frog fishing lure that became popular with anglers throughout the Midwest," the company said in a Facebook post about the anniversary.

In addition to fishing lures and tackle boxes, Flambeau owns the Duncan Toys Co., including its line of yo-yos, and the ArtBin brand of art storage cases.