Econocorp Helps Brown Manufacturing Eliminate The “Bottle” Neck

As the demand for Brown Manufacturing's bottle openers continued to grow, they decided that another cartoning machine was required to compliment the addition of more printing machines for their product manufacturer capability.

29/09/06 Back in the days when most beverages were sold in glass bottles, there was a need for a bottle opener that would not crack or break the bottle. In 1925, Raymond Brown Sr. recognized this opportunity and started the Brown Manufacturing Co. in Newport News, VA. Over the years, patents were obtained in four countries for five different opener styles. The company was sold in 1988 and moved to its present location in Atlanta, Georgia and is now under the leadership of David Brim. Bottle openers were packaged by hand for over 75 years. The real constraint was the tedious act of hand painting the bottle openers. When a more efficient technology was developed to pad printing them with a machine, David Brim states, "we found that the bottleneck of the operation then moved to the hand boxing of the openers."

So in the year 2000, the company felt it was time to investigate speeding up the packaging process and reducing labor costs. David found ECONOCORP on the Internet and then made plans to visit the Chicago show to further investigate cartoning machine alternatives. A small, economical cartoning machine was very important for their location and volume requirements.

After a thorough investigation, Brown Manufacturing purchased the ECONOSEAL E-SYSTEM 2000 automatic horizontal cartoner, set up for manual product loading. Since purchasing this machine, David tells us "It is so low maintenance that even I can work on it if needed."

As the demand for Brown Manufacturing's bottle openers continued to grow, they decided that another cartoning machine was required to compliment the addition of more printing machines for their product manufacturer capability. This time Brown decided to upgrade a bit for more speed and purchased the Spartan cartoner. Now one person can actually both individually carton 4000 bottle openers and master pack them into corrugated shippers within one 8 hour shift. Brim states, "We have been very happy with both ECONOSEAL cartoners".