Mailings, Cartons Drive Coated Board

Coated board demand is humming, tied to the growth in high-end consumer ads, and pushed a bit on the low end by the pre-election political mailers that streamed into households.

Paper mills geared up for these one-time orders, hoping their new products would have a carryover effect into holiday shopping (catalogs, magazines, inserts) and annual report seasons. U.S. production should be above 6 million tons in 2006, and imports will add another 1 million tons in consumption. Coated and uncoated SBS (solid bleached sulfate) share of the market is around 40%.

New product development focused yet again on brightness and whiteness. Designers push for higher optical properties for contrast and impact, and mills are also working on smoothness (more), stiffness (more), weight (less) and ability to dry (faster).

The latest relaunch, based on market surveys and product development, was recently completed by MeadWestvaco for Tango. “Our strategy was to clearly identify the differentiated value that we bring to the customer,” says the firm's marketing director, Steve Anderson. The company surveyed 150 consumers of graphic board to determine critical factors involved in deciding on a product to run. The need for brighter, whiter sheets that dry fast and don't crack at the fold was paramount. (Studies by CapVentures and by Domtar/GATF found likewise.)

“Customers wanted flawless on-press performance and consistency,” says Anderson. Machine enhancements, coupled with implementation of Six Sigma methodology, have led to trouble-free performance rating on Tango that now exceeds 99.7%, he says. “Tango is now ideally suited as a coated bristol for everyday printing applications,” Anderson contends, though it “is equally suited as a displacement for applications which have traditionally called for a No. 2 cover.” New Tango now sells at 93 GE brightness in C1S and C2S from 8-pt. caliper and up.

Finnish board manufacturer M-Real sponsored a study with Lumene, a beauty care producer in Finland, interviewing printers and end users to find they universally identified luxury and trust with stiff, heavy boards with high gloss or special surface effects. Folding cartons from these materials had immediate impact at point-of-purchase decisions.

Through the study, Riika Joukio, marketing VP for M-Real, learned, “Packaging now out-performs advertising by a factor of three in prompting the decision to purchase.”

M-Real's product line includes the dominant brand Avanta, Carta and Chromolux, but is better known in the U.S. for Kemi-Art and Galerie Art.

Other popular imports include Eska by Kappa Graphic Board, and Invercote by Iggesund Paperboard. The world's largest forest products company (and one of the world's oldest commercial enterprises), Stora Enso, has its own division for the health and beauty care niche, featuring EnsoCoat and EnsoGloss.

Unisource has just introduced the private-labeled Nordic Plus, which it says stands up to diecuts, folding, embossing, foil stamping and cover effects, pocket folders, calendars, packaging, greeting cards, direct mail and reply cards. It offers “a tremendous advantage over most conventional, heavier weight C2S grades,” says Mark Potter, Unisource VP marketing. It is rated 92 bright for a caliper range of 8 to 12 pts., and 90 bright for 15 to 24 pts.