At the Xiamen exhibition last month, a young man with a backpack wandered around our booth for forty minutes. When my colleague Xiao Liu was about to greet him, the young man asked: "Can your coffee packaging machine do a minimum order of 500 bags? Our brand has just started, and we are afraid of stocking up and pressing funds." This is like a touchstone, just testing the true ability of our customized service.
This customer is a boutique coffee startup team in Hangzhou, focusing on the concept of "weekly flavor". Their biggest pain point is that they have to ensure 8-10 new product iterations per month, but they dare not produce on a large scale. During the first video conference, founder Zhang pointed his phone camera at the warehouse and said, "Look at this pile of generic packaging from OEM factories. Consumers say our products use the same bags as chain brands. Where does the brand sense come from?"
We immediately sent pre-sales engineers to conduct on-site surveys. In the shared workshop they rented, they found that the existing equipment could not handle the parallel needs of three forms: hanging ear bags, nitrogen fresh-keeping cans, and coffee liquid capsules. Old technician Master Zhou touched the equipment and shook his head: "I have to replace you with Transformers!" The post-90s team present was amused and slapped their thighs.
The most exciting part of the solution demonstration stage was the "packaging machine talent show". We projected three customized solutions on coffee bean sacks: Solution A focuses on fast mold change, which is suitable for their high-frequency new products; Solution B focuses on intelligent connection, which can connect to their e-commerce pre-sale system; Solution C emphasizes visual recognition to ensure that the weight error of each bag of coffee powder does not exceed plus or minus 0.5 grams. Unexpectedly, the post-95s operations director took a different approach: "Can we mix and match ABC? We are willing to pay for flexible production!"
The final customized coffee packaging machine can be called "Transformers PLUS". The main body adopts a modular design, and the filling head can be freely combined like Lego blocks. The most amazing thing is the programmable visual system - last month they launched a birthday-themed ear bag, and our equipment can actually recognize the twelve constellations and automatically match the blessing code. Mr. Zhang sent three WeChat Moments at the acceptance site: "This is not a packaging machine, it is clearly a new employee of the brand department!"
An interesting thing happened on the day of production. As soon as the equipment started running, the designer suddenly exclaimed with a newly printed sample bag: "The hot stamping position is 2 mm to the right of the design draft!" Our engineer calmly adjusted the parameters and completed the visual calibration in three minutes. This incident later became a classic case of their team: "Even the packaging machine has obsessive-compulsive disorder, no wonder consumers say our products are like works of art."
Now this startup brand has entered the shelves of boutique supermarkets, and those coffee bags with customized hot stamping have become a landscape on the shelves. Last week, they sent a gift box of new products, and the card attached read: "Thank you for not treating us as small customers." In fact, we should thank you - it is these new brands that dare to think and ask that force our coffee packaging machines to become more and more "smart".
