Siegwerk, a global provider of printing inks for packaging applications and labels, is now offering its cross-application ink and packaging expertise directly to brand owners. The Brand Owner Collaboration (BOC) department combines all the company’s competence and skills in one with the goal to explore improvement opportunities with brand owners.

The department is designed to add value by generating cost-savings for potential re-investments into innovation through new performance specifications and/or enhance current packaging solutions by new features or designs.

By creating a triangular relationship with converters and brand owners, Siegwerk sees the opportunity to better understand the market needs and to identify relevant topics, enabling the company to shape the future of packaging by channeling its R&D activities into the market segments of the future. Through a direct collaboration with Siegwerk, brand owners in return benefit from Siegwerk’s overarching technical knowledge and conceptual skills with regard to a wide range of packaging applications.

As the BOC team works across the company, it is set up to utilize the full force of Siegwerk’s Business Unit excellence as support, leading to faster response times and cross-application information.

“We don’t see packaging as a technology, we see it as a business model. Therefore we consider the entire value chain by default, targeting specific areas that unlock value for the broader chain,” explains Belal Habib, head of Global Brand Owner Collaboration at Siegwerk. “When focusing on performance specifications for packaging to enable less restrictive material choices, significant technical but also conceptual skills are required to generate tangible results that can be applied to both innovation and value generation. And this is the exact support our BOC team can offer.”

Next to concrete brand owner requests correlating with Siegwerk’s ink expertise, the BOC team can also help in handling overarching requests of strategic relevance such as those related to the Circular Economy. “Our pan-Siegwerk lens enables us to join the dots between external obligations, application-specific requirements and the brand owners’ individual needs and spot opportunities for improvement that could impact either us as ink provider, the converter and/ or brand owner or the entire relationship,” adds Habib.

Whether it is about generating and delivering specific brand owner projects, developing and executing inks, finishes and coatings that deliver better value than before, or supporting brand owners in areas with limited resources like the development of packaging from a Circular Economy perspective, Siegwerk has the experience and the skills to support, the company notes.

Brand Owner Collaboration strategically complements the company’s offerings designed to add incremental business value for all partners by an integrated relationship with both converters and brand owners translating new insights into innovation and savings and subsequently leveraging the entire packaging value chain. Therefore, the BOC team combines a variety of expertise including technical excellence in ink formulation, business and strategy skills, as well as packaging development experiences.

With Habib, Siegwerk has gained an expert for packaging development and technology as head of the new BOC team. During his career, Habib gathered vast experiences at different international brand owners like Unilever, Mondelez, Kraft and pladis International. He knows about the needs of brand owners and will help Siegwerk to further position itself as a key partner for packaging given the company’s packaging ink expertise on the one hand, and its wide industry network and strong capabilities across the chain on the other hand.