What lies ahead for James Cropper?
Le 29/03/2024
British papermaker James Cropper has embarked on a « transformation plan ». How is this set to impact its luxury business? Richard Bracewell, promoted Managing Director of the Creative Papers & Luxury Packaging division in August 2023 and Tricia Hartmann, Luxury Packaging Global Lead, talk to Formes de Luxe about James Cropper’s strategic roadmap, and the luxury trends that are guiding developments in its molded pulp packaging activity.
How is James Cropper’s « transformation plan », which debuted late 2022, impacting your paper division?
Richard Bracewell: Our specialty paper business supplies numerous markets, including more traditional ones, and in particular stationery, files, folders and envelopes. In the face of increased digitization, these segments have been seeing a natural decline over the years and it accelerated during and since the pandemic. James Cropper is growing significantly in other areas, including luxury packaging, which had us rethink the areas we wanted to focus on going forward.
Is this what the company refers to as « right sizing »?
RB: Yes, it’s about reorganizing the business to service what we see as the markets of today and tomorrow. We’re downsizing some of our manufacturing areas but investing in others where we are seeing greater growth.
Richard Bracewell, Managing Director of the Creative Papers & Luxury Packaging division ©James Cropper
Does the reduction of paper machines from four to three reflect that strategy?
RB: It does, but we’re also moving from a system where we work 24 hours, 5 and a half days a week to 24 hours, seven days a week with fewer machines, so in terms of available production hours we’re increasing. The plan is to run two machines out of three at any one time and when one machine is shut down, we can work on it from an engineering perspective. One of the more energy intensive aspects of industry is starting and stopping machines, so by running continuously we reduce the amount of downtime, and we have greater efficiency.
Alongside this, we are making significant investments in our decarbonization program. We’re looking to reduce pretty much to zero the amount of fossil fuels we use by 2030.
Source : Formes De Luxe