Packaging
Assembly Line
3D-Printed Molds Speed New Unilever Bottle Designs to Market
For Unilever, bottles that are stretch blow molded with a 3D printed tool are nearly indistinguishable from the final product produced through traditional metal tooling processes, and get product to market more quickly.
Stefano Cademartiri, CAD and prototyping owner at Unilever and Flavio Migliarelli, R&D design manager at packaging supplier Serioplast Global Services have worked hand in hand to test the viability of 3D-printed molds for low-volume stretch blow molding applications. This practice has accelerated prototyping and pilot testing, cutting lead time by six weeks and costs by as much as 90%.
Typically, Serioplast would either directly 3D print Unilever bottle mockups for prototypes, or blow mold them. But until recently, 3D-printed mockups didn’t represent the right feel or transparency and were not reliable enough to be sent to consumers. However, building production-quality samples through SBM requires expensive metal tooling, adding six to nine weeks of lead time to a typical pilot testing phase due to the complexity of the process and outsourcing the production of the mold.
These SBM molds are traditionally machined from metal by CNC, which requires specialized equipment, CAM software, and skilled labor. The production of metal tooling is generally outsourced to service providers offering four- to eight-week lead time that cost anywhere from $2,000 to over $100,000, depending on the complexity of the part and the number of parts per mold.