Folding carton first revolution - Robert Gair

[A far better description than mine, by an ETSY author, can be found here]


A concise (abridged) description from Wikipedia:


In the 1840s, cartons were made by hand and held together with tacks and string, and used only for expensive items (such as jewelry). Mass production of the cartons was invented, partly by accident, at the Robert Gair Company in Brooklyn, New York. Machinery at the end of the press had been set up carelessly by a pressman, and machinery cut through the material. This ruined the press but gave them an idea: printing and cutting could be done with one machine. Previously, cutting of printed cardboard had been done manually. From the mistake in 1879, Gair developed a process for mass production of boxes. In 1897, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) became the first large company to adopt the new cartons, for Uneeda Biscuits. Other manufacturers soon followed. With inexpensive packaging now even common items could be placed in a showy carton and each carton became its own advertisement. The product was also protected, and the contents had a longer shelf life.


Let's look at the manual production of cardboard boxes: Carton is cut to measure, creased, folded, tied and glued - all by hand. Care is taken for accurate, stable product. A reasonable estimate will be, say, several minutes per box, say 2 minutes.


Now let's imagine a full-scale Gair process, with boxes running through the machine at thousands per hour, or say a hundred per minute or more. Here we see again the 100x factor of acceleration in the previous, manual process' bottleneck. Also, the level of skill is reduced, from artisan level to machine operation and control.


As expected from true revolutions, there is a wide economic and social impact:

• Imagine the retail process before Gair. The crucial retail act of portioning is done manually, by a store employee, from a sack or a large box. the process is slow, expensive - and in complete control of the store, while the goods' producers have limited influence. The store owner can promote whatever he prefers, price goods as he sees fit, and needs to take care of freshness, proper weight and volume, etc. The Gair process puts the power in the hands of the goods maker: Portioning is done in the factory, communication with the consumer is achieved by printing on the box, and pricing and brand management are now determined outside of the store. This shift in power towards the vendors was in place for many decades, until the invention and application of bar-codes during the 1970's gave some power back to the store owners.
• For the consumers, freshness, proper weights, brands and choice were suddenly easily gained. Instead of limited choice, goods could be made to large variety catering various needs. The ability to shop boxes off-the-shelf enabled the modern supermarket, and made it easy to stock goods at home, freed homemakers time and effort.

The balance of power towards goods makers let them optimize for efficiency, via limiting variety and focusing on price. However, when stores could clearly follow sales performance with bar codes, the pressure on better sales performance was on, forcing goods makers to increase variety and satisfy specific needs. This reduction in batch size is accelerating relentlessly, making box batches smaller, reducing efficiencies, increasing costs and challenging production floor managers.