Thinking inside, outside and beyond the box: putting the customer first is the key to success for Encase

Celebrating 50 years in business in 2019, corrugated cardboard packaging company Encase puts its success and longevity down to a strong focus on customer service.

That’s what comes with being an organisation with a global reach but which still holds by the principles of a family-run firm — Encase is now in the hands of the third generation of the family that founded the company back in the late 1960s.

The company has three main hubs across the UK — East Kilbride, Banbury and a facility at Leeds-Bradford International Airport in West Yorkshire.
As part of an international packaging group, Canadian Overseas Packaging Industries, Encase is very much a worldwide concern, with plants across the Caribbean and East Africa.

“We have 50 years’ experience making corrugated boxes of all shapes and sizes,” says David Hainsworth, the Group Sales and Marketing Director. “We work with a wide range of companies and market sectors, from food and beverages to automotive and household goods. E-commerce in its widest sense is a huge growth area for us, and we have extensive experience supplying both small start-up businesses as well as blue chip organisations with tailored solutions and corrugated packaging for machine erect systems.”

David puts Encase’s success and strength down to a key factor. “We are proudly independent,” he says. “And that means our whole ethos is about customer delight. Not being tied to paper manufacture gives us a different dynamic to many of our competitors, and allows us to provide genuine choice and truly take cost out of the supply chain. Each and every one of our customers is equally important to us, whatever the size of their spend.”
“Our people make the difference,” he says. “We don’t just supply our customers, we partner with them for the longer term. We begin with the customer’s needs and objectives and work back from there to ensure they get everything they want, from the size, shape and performance of the box to the way in which it is delivered.

“We’re extremely proud of what we do. We work with passion and integrity and we’re really focused as a business on delighting our customers.”

Across its three UK sites, Encase employs over 250 people, and the UK operation has a turnover of some £40 million. Having now assembled a team of industry professionals, Encase is not only perfectly positioned to firmly establish itself as the packaging partner of choice but is also currently going through a full brand refresh that brings to life its ethos and culture – a modern, forward-thinking customer-focussed business.
And, of course, with an increasing focus on the sustainability of packaging of all kinds, Encase is hugely proud of its environmental policies.
Hainsworth says, “We use between 75- 80 per cent recycled materials in our manufacturing process, and what we make is 100 per cent recyclable. We as a company are hugely pro-sustainability.”
And if you thought a box is a box is a box, think again, because Encase is heavy on the research and development of new products and new methods of working.

These include development of machinery that runs faster and more efficiently, embracing digital printing of boxes, and developing cardboard solutions through a team of experienced designers.
They partly achieve this through being members of Alliabox, a pan-European network of family-owned corrugated packaging businesses.
Being part of this wider alliance, formed of ten companies with 70 plants operating in 16 countries, provides members the opportunity to share best practice, enter new markets, and work together on development of products.

Being so invested as a company in the European business landscape does, of course, raise the spectre of Brexit and what might happen. But Hainsworth is confident that Encase has, as far as it’s possible to do so, made itself “Brexit-proof”.
“We have prepared as well as we can,” he says. “We have necessary stocks of raw material and parts and we’re confident that whatever happens, we are in a strong position.”
As to what else the future holds, that comes back to Encase’s core principle. Hainsworth says, “Our future strategies are determined by the customers, and what they want from us, a personal touch as it were.”
New procedures in place include the setting up of design centres where customers can “test drive” their packaging needs… literally while they wait; within just a couple of hours Encase clients can hold a printed prototype in their hands.

So innovative is Encase’s approach that the company caught the attention of the owner one of the UK’s most exciting start-up businesses, supplying confectionary to the premium retailers. And when she wanted “premium, personalised packaging to create must-have gifts” she went straight to Encase, who mocked up exactly what she wanted while she waited.
It’s that personal touch which makes Encase one of the biggest and most forward-thinking independent packaging companies in the UK. The company’s stated aim is “to challenge and provide choice, not driven by tonnage or paper cycles but by the provision of a solutions approach to market with the ability to analyse the supply chain survey and expose unnecessary costs to our customers”.

It’s that passion for customer service, honed over half a century, combined with a hunger to keep innovating, which keeps Encase in its enviable position as one of the most fast-reacting and trusted packaging brands in the country.

Tel: 01132 505 616
www.encase.co.uk