What is it?
It's probably not something anyone really ever thinks about, but when selling bottles of liquid that come with spray triggers, things can get pretty complicated in the logistics department.
ideally we'd ship the trigger already attached to the bottle right? absolutely! much easier for you, the user, to use straight away, and less waste in blanking caps and bungs. this would be our preference too (those caps and bungs cost money you know!).
it turns out trigger sprayers are pretty terrible things at being shipped around. if they break, the contents of the bottle are soon soaking everything around it. Not something couriers are too happy with - especially when shipping soaps and degreasers!
For this reason couriers and online retailers demand that bottles are either double bagged to prevent leakages, or blank-capped and the trigger is held separately.
What are the options?
Not many good ones!
Sellotape - not a bad option but looks a bit budget and when used on waxy HDPE bottles the tape tends to peel off.
Shrink wrap - probably the most common option, but can be quite slow to apply in a production line and costly when you consider the cost of the sleeve and heating machine.
Nothing - as an experiment we actually tried shipping bottles with no attachment at all by shipping the trigger loose with the bottles. this relies on retailers (or warehouse pickers / packers if sold online) to remember to include them. unfortunately, they don't always remember!
So ... erm ... sorry if you've ever received one of our bottles with no trigger - it was all in the name of progress we promise!
Single use plastics
A shrink wrap is the definition of a single-use plastic. used only once before they are thrown away or recycled. often of negligible importance or used for aesthetic or pure convenience retail purposes, these items make up half of the 300 million tons of plastic we throw away each year and are the low hanging fruit to be solved with more easily recylable / biodegradable alternatives.
What have you done then?
We love our recycled raw card here at peaty's so we started to design our own solution.
Several months, seven design revisions and many packing trials further down the line we've finally found what we've been looking for:
- Cheap and simple to produce
- 100% recyclable and biodegradable
- Easy to apply over the top of a pre-capped bottle
- Flexibility to fit 500ml and 1l bottle widths
- Strong enough to do the job and nothing more
Rather than put a patent or design registration on this design - and ultimately restrict other companies from moving away from shrink wrapping - we decided to give this design away for free for anyone to use.
Simply click the button above to download an adobe illustrator editable vector PDF of our design, drawn to scale.
Use it as it is, put your company logo on it, edit it, we don't care, it's our gift to you.
Cheers 🍻
