Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

July 18, 2017 Manufacturing Insights

Laddawn increasing sales through online design tool

Owen Richardson, vice president of sales and marketing at Laddawn.

Packaging materials manufacturer Laddawn is a few months into offering online product design services to customers, and so far, they’re taking off and boosting business. The company will launch a mobile site in a few months, to make it easier for customers to build and purchase items from their phones and tablets.

Owen Richardson, vice president of sales and marketing, spoke about online offerings, the company’s renewable goals, and what the future will look like.

You recently launched a tool on your website allowing customers to design their own print package and get information on pricing and lead times. How is that tool being utilized? Have customers taken to it?

Customer feedback continues to be super positive, and they’re using our online Print Designer in bigger numbers now – about 1,000 times in June.

What other new online tools have you started offering recently, if any?

We’re adding the ability to use Print Designer on more types of items in more categories all the time. We also recently we added a new visual designer for a product category called Wicketed bags. These are bags held on a metal wire for use in automated and manual product packaging operations. Customers have a hard time specifying these – because there the number of nuanced things to specify – like headers styles, wicket lengths, gussets and type of release from those wickets. So, we created a Wicketed Bag Builder on Laddawn.com. It shows each element visually as the customer builds their wicketed item. Easy, right? Requests for Wicketed bags at Laddawn have tripled since its introduction, just three months ago.

Last year, you said Laddawn's renewable energy purchases would exceed 20 million kilowatt hours. What do you expect that figure will be this year?

Thanks for asking. We just reported that number out to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month, in fact. In the 12 months ending May 30, we used just over 24 million kilowatt hours throughout our six facilities (manufacturing and warehousing in Sterling, Dallas, Sparks, Nev., Atlanta and Manchester, Iowa & our Devens headquarters). We’re so happy to maintain our position as manufacturing with 100 percent renewable energy. We are green-e certified, and you can find us on EPA’s Green Power Partner list, too.

Any new products or innovations you would like to share?

Laddawn mobile is just a few months away. This fall, our customers will be able to log on to search and build items and get pricing and lead times from their smartphones and tablets.

Anything else you would like to add?

The next decade is going to be about bringing consumer-quality websites to the B2B marketplace. It’s why we introduced Print Designer and Wicketed Bag Builder and why a more fully responsive site design will soon afford our customers a B2C-level experience on their mobile devices, too.

This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by Laura Finaldi, WBJ staff writer.

 

Sign up for Enews

WBJ Web Partners

0 Comments

Order a PDF