Pennine Lancashire Business News Articles

MLD have a nose for success

MLD Engineering Ltd was established in 1997, and now employs 6 staff. The company is a precision engineering and toolmaking enterprise, which, with its sister company Concept Plastics, is capable of taking a design in plastics from first design concepts through toolmaking to injection moulding.

One of MLD’s largest customers, Rexam Packaging, approached MLD with a new proposal. Rexam’s more up-market customers, such as Calvin Klein luxury fragrances, have been moving away from all-plastics closure caps, into the use of metals, albeit still with a plastics interior to provide the snap-fit. The feel, weight and variety of finishes achievable with metals augment the quality feel of the packaged product.

The DDU assisted MLD with £5,000 in funding for the design and production of a series of creative prototypes to take to the prestigious European Exhibition.

These metal components are at present quite plain and restricted in design, and the fragrance manufacturers and the packaging company do not have expertise in automatic machining of metals, and therefore are not aware of the increased freedom of shapes conferred by modern Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machining centres.

Rexam requested that MLD carry out an exercise in demonstrating the forms which can be achieved using CNC technology, and which can also be mass-produced automatically by repetition machining on these CNC centres.

The resulting designs are to be shown on the Rexam stand at a major European packaging exhibition in January, to court the custom of the high value cosmetics market. Even prior to the event, enquiries for the new enclosures have been received from a Paris fragrance manufacturer.

There are opportunities to take the concept further with, for instance, very high quality outers with interchangeable inners, and even individual customisation of products – engraving of logos or even signatures – which the CNC technologies economically allow.

This is one company’s answer to the difficult financial climate – to go up market where the potential return for a quality product is much higher.