Premier Plastics
Redefining the Status Quo in Packaging Solutions

Whenever someone receives a “package,” the sensation of holding something that they can unveil is wonderful. Ergo, specialist manufacturing ensures that each ounce of happiness is entirely contained by packages of varying types and sizes. Premier Plastics is a veteran in the field of packaging and related services, complete with a robust manufacturing department. So whatever the need be, Premier Plastics can offer a helping hand for companies that are not well-diversified in their packaging offerings. The company is very diverse in what they bring to the table, be it in terms of markets served, such as food packaging, retail packaging, nutraceutical packaging, medical device packaging, and hardware packaging. Premier Plastics is also uniquely diversified in its in-house manufacturing ability, with high-speed production lines serving diverse vertical markets. They also offer contract manufacturing services for a full turnkey solution for clients. This versatility, in turn, translates to a reduction in clients’ production and packaging costs.

Capabilities forged by legacy

Jim Holbrook, President, and CEO of Premier Plastics, started the company in September of 1989. He had been in the thermoforming industry for about ten years before that, working for other companies before acquiring the assets he needed to build his own company. The company has grown organically ever since. Their solutions boast multiple high-speed forming lines with flexible real-time capabilities, an in-house tooling department, state–of–the–art rapid prototyping, and a certified cleanroom. Premier Plastics is also cGMP compliant and ISO 9001:2015 certified, as well as registration with FDA and USDA.

The company uses its high-end capabilities to operate via a very hands-on and interactive approach with their clients. Right from the initial meeting with the client, Premier Plastics will learn their pain points.

In their experience, the most common client challenges are around quality, on-time delivery, and pricing. Premier Plastics tackles these with their unique ability to think outside of the box, starting with the client’s needs, to offer potentially several different possible solutions. This affords clients added versatility in their production and packaging costs and adds to the presentation and marketing availability of different packaging styles.

“We pride ourselves in our processes, and it starts with the D, which is what we call discovery. We want to discover everything about the project, understand it, and identify the company’s goals for that particular product,” states Holbrook.

Cutting Edge Tech Meets Cutting Edge Operations

When it comes to engagement with clients, Premier Plastics’ discovery process entails up to two meetings, depending on the engineering complexity and different departments involved. In the next phase, Premier Plastics brings in their in-house design and engineering team to take concepts and create a design and prototypes that can be presented to the client. After this, Premier Plastics is fully engaged with the client and go into tooling and engineering. With full turnkey, full in-house design and tooling capabilities, Premier Plastics has total control on its quality and speed to market, from design and prototyping to the final design and production tooling. Once production tool-ing is complete, the company follows through to validation of that tooling with the client. Upon subsequent approval, the product rolls into production. All of this happens on a pretty strict time-line depending on the client’s needs.

One such client, an entity that has been engaged with Premier Plastics for about 15 years, were doing an aftermarket segment for a recreational product. They came to Premier Plastics because their packaging was lackluster, and they were losing market share. Premier Plastics sat down with them to address the challenge and gave them several options as far as the packaging was concerned. The company looked at it from a marketing standpoint and stated that the packaging should not be the focal point, but instead, the product. Premier Plastics had two to three different iterations of packaging designs and concepts that they presented. The client selected a design, which they then prototyped and test-marketed. It was received very well and went into full pro-duction within six months. Premier Plastics heard from a grateful client that their sales had risen 1000 percent in one year.

Having scripted many such success stories, the future looks bright for Premier Plastics. The company is currently expanding one of its core divisions, which is nutraceuticals, i.e., vitamins, tablets, capsules, and retail packaging. Premier Plastics is fully licensed with the state, registered with the FDA and their medical device packaging division is in expansion mode right now. They invested $1.5 million in equipment last year and close to $2 million with support equipment. This year they’re looking to invest another two and a half million in capital expenditures to increase their throughput volumes with some medical device clients. The company is currently estimating a 20 to 30 percent growth in their just day-to-day standard business. Premier Plastics is thus on a trajectory of growth and future development toward greater success.