Unilever is a multinational company of consumer goods.
We own many different brands like Domestos,
like Sif,
like Svelto,
like Lysophon,
Knorr,
Dove,
Axe,
Ben & Jerry's,
Helmhans and many,
many,
many,
many others.
For a company as Unilever that does consumer goods,
you must be into the market as soon
as possible or before your competitors.
You need to offer to the consumers the best product
with the best price in the short time as possible.
And the 3D printer world,
in this case the Formlab machine,
helps us to speed up our process.
Cerea Plus is a rigid
packaging company for major brands.
We produce 4 billion bottles per year.
Unilever is one of our major clients.
Together we work to design new bottles,
new experiences for the customer.
Stretchable molding is a technology that starts from a preform.
It's an injected part that is blown after
eating with a sort of open-closed mold.
The development of the packaging is always a challenge.
We collaborate with the Serioplast and we use the 3L for
producing the 3D print mold for production of PET bottles.
With the help of Formula engineers,
we identify the material which could be good to prepare.
A mold that gives us the possibility to have few bottles
with the real materials in order to do our own tests.
A standard tool made by metal can be
priced like more than 10,000 euros.
And it takes from 6 to 12 weeks to be done.
3D printed mold enables a new workflow
for us that helps us to reduce,
of course,
timing and cost.
In like one week or two weeks stop,
we can have a real sample that allows us to measure,
to test the performance of the bottle.
With a 3D printed mold,
we can save up to 70% time and 90%
cost compared to the standard mold.
The 3D printer can give you the possibility to
prepare something instead of a simple prototype,
a real bottle with the real material,
with the real weight and everything to use in terms
of consumer tests and also packing line tests.
So you can identify immediately if you are on the
right road on your development or if you need to
change before you do mistakes that can cost more.
If in the past they had to wait up to 12 weeks just for one design,
now we can make like five designs.
The Formlab machine plus the 10K resin together can offer the
real possibility to have very good details on the bottles.
Especially for the bottles that have some logos or some different
things like a lemon detail which requires lots of precision and so on.
We are using the same process window of a standard pilot mold.
And this is super good because we could test the final
process windows and see what happens to the bottle.
We are talking about up to 30 bar pressure.
It's absolutely good and reliable on that.
We are also talking about 100 degrees heating for the preform
without any worrying on the cavity of the 3D printed mold.
We could produce very easily up to 100,
200 bottles every day.
We can go up to 1000 without more timing.
It's absolutely what the client is asking for,
especially for consumer tests.
And we also have some bottles for our
internal tests like dimensional reports,
but especially performance tests like bulging or drop testing,
capping tests.
Something is on your screen in a short time is in your hands.
A real product with a real bottle,
with a real cap and the real label.
The big impact we have by the 3D printer is absolutely
the possibility to have your dreams that come true.