Specialty Containers

We produce specialty bottles and containers in many shapes, sizes, and materials. Our engineers can assist in design and material choice, to ensure your product looks and functions exactly as you want it to.

What’s the Big Deal About a Container?

What’s the big deal, you may ask? A container is a container. How hard can this be? Why do we need to work with a high-end engineering company with ISO certification and a bunch of overachieving engineers to get a blow molded bottle? Why not just send our specs to China and save loads of money?

Great questions. The basic answer is, because the goal of blow molding is not just to make the container. It’s to make the container as readily manufacturable as possible. Any container can be made a lot of different ways. Our engineering degrees, quality certification, and ability to speak, read and write English allow us to optimize the blow molding process at minimal cost. The hard (fun) part – the art of blow molding – is finding that optimal process for your specific application.

We begin by learning about your requirements. You may need a certain type of material. You certainly have size and design specifications. Functional requirements. We take all those into account and begin to design a blow molding process that gets you what you need reliably, every time.

Examples of Custom Bottles & Containers

The Three Questions (and more)

What’s the function of the container?

In other words, what’s its job? Is it a medical application? Does it contain or process fluid? The function often determines a whole bunch of parameters, from material type to design to wall thickness and port diameter. (See our case studies for details.)

How does it perform that function?

In other words, how does it interact with its environment to do its job? Does it have to fit into a machine? Deal with high heat? Withstand shaking and vibration? The “how” also limits and suggests what’s possible and optimal in container design.

What’s your initial sense of the desired shape of the container?

You probably have a picture in mind. A certain size, shape, weight, thickness, transparency or opaqueness, stiffness or flexibility. It helps us to begin from your mental image – we’ll refine it based on what could work and what will work best to accomplish your goals.

Solutions and High Hurdles

After we’ve chewed on your answers to these and other questions, we go to the drawing board (that’s so we can go back to the drawing board later 😉 and come up with a recommendation for the best approach to design and manufacture. We look for the easiest possible material to mold to get you what you need.

If we see a high hurdle, the conversation can get, well, interesting. We’ve created hundreds of different containers, including many whose shape can only be described by the technical term “weird.” So we have a good sense of what’s going to be very hard to accomplish within the assumptions you may have made.

For example, some materials respond readily to being stretched, and others just complain and moan and show their displeasure in more serious ways, like blowing a hole in the container. If we see an impasse between your initial specs and what we know to be possible, we work with you to create a new set of assumptions.

Case Study: The Mystery Container

For example, we once were asked to create a container for holding fluid within a medical instrument. The container was to have fluid pumped in and out.

Now, that paragraph might sound like we’re being purposely vague to protect the privacy of our client, which is cool. But the truth is, our client was so secretive, that’s all we knew about the application! (The medical device industry can be pretty brutal, in case that’s not your field.)

What they would tell us was that the container needed a whopping 1/8″ thick wall and three 1/4″ ports. We knew right away that their dual desires for a thick container will small diameter ports were incompatible. We had to figure out a way to work around the incompatibility.

The story had a happy ending (which is probably why we’re sharing it on our web site). We got creative and added rigidity while maintaining thinner walls. (We added beads and bumps on the surface of the container, kind of like corrugation. It’s a trade secret, but we know you won’t tell.) And our client had to increase the diamater of the port to 3/8″.

The Flexcraft Difference

I learned in Marketing 101 that we’re supposed to talk about how we’re different from other firms. So I thought about that question for a while, and here’s what I’ve come up with. The big difference is in the quality of our ongoing communication with our clients. We start talking about design considerations very early in the process. And we continue that focus on optimizing the design throughout the entire project.

And what this means to you is…

An application that not only works the way you want it to, but can be produced reliably.
Constant testing and monitoring of the part in real world conditions, so we can make changes and improvements to meet your real world specifications and goals.
Rigorous quality control on our end so you don’t have to worry about discovering part failure after we’ve just shipped you a metric ton of engineered stuff.
If you have a container or bottle that needs to be blow molded into existence, you can tell us about it using the form below (we’ll get back to you quickly), or just pick up the phone and give me a call: