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The new 16-oz PET bottle for T.N. Dickinson’s Witch Hazel replaced glass and PVC alternatives.

Now available in all-new 8- and 16-oz PET bottles is T.N. Dickinson’s Witch Hazel Astringent. To replace glass, the company first used PVC bottles, says Curt Strong, vice president of Dickinson Brands, which distributes and markets the T.N. Dickinson’s line. “But while PVC bottles were lightweight, transparent, and puncture resistant, we eventually found that PET was superior to PVC in clarity, color consistency, and strength,” he says.

A major blow molder helped design and manufacture new 8- and 16-oz PET bottles, but Dickinson Brands had some difficulty during filling. “Our first supplier of PET bottles had difficulty maintaining a consistent wall thickness, and we experienced an increased number of rejects and bottles that failed on the filling lines, resulting in reduced production. Finally,” Strong says, “we called in another supplier of ours, Novapak Corp., and asked them to develop a prototype PET bottle as quickly as possible.”

Novapak (Eatontown, NJ) used a two-stage injection-stretch blow molding process for PET containers, which injection molds universal preforms separately before blow molding the finished containers. This helps minimize set-up time and tooling costs.

Lower-gram-weight PET preforms were used instead of heavier-gram PET preforms, reports David Clelland, design engineering manager at Novapak, which improves the already strong PET.

Novapak also took time to understand the witch hazel filling lines at the Dickinson Brands plant in eastern Connecticut. Clelland says: “You need to know the specs of the filling line’s bottle indexers, the type of filling nozzles and fill speeds, the pressure applied to the bottle by the capper, and how the bottles will be labeled in order to design a container that will be compatible with filling lines.”

The 16-oz PET bottle features a prominent recessed panel for T.N. Dickinson’s new label. “We asked Novapak to add a slight blue tint to the new bottle to compliment our new seven-color labeling,” Strong says. The new bottle is labeled front and back, with the inside of the back label providing a splash graphic that serves as a background for the front label’s brand name and slogans. “When filled, the bottles create a three-dimensional effect that highlights our pure, 100% natural witch hazel product,” Strong says. “The transparency of PET, combined with the superior construction of this package, makes us confident that it will withstand the test of time.”