Tin boxes make a great type of merchandise packaging today. From the most common storage cans to elegant gift boxes for the 100-years-old finest French wine, high-quality tin boxes always add extra value and special flair to most common stuff they contain. While tin box-making doesn’t require much fancy technologies, great care and design twist are required to develop the best products. The unique example of JEF Limited, a Hong Kong-based tin boxes and gift boxes maker, shows how it has become an expert in the industry.

According to Miss Betty Lam, general manager of JEF Limited, the company originated amidst the worldwide surge in demand for high-quality tin gift boxes in the early 1990s. Today, tin boxes are no longer handcrafted items being hammered out by hands. She added, “Due to the structural improvement in production procedure and availability of wider choice of materials, tin boxes usually come in four forms: Cone-shaped, square-shaped, bucket-shaped and egg-shaped. Nonetheless, we don’t simply use any type of metal to turn out our tin boxes. Rather, we only adopt high-grade tin plates with good surface coating to manufacture our boxes.”

“As opposed to aluminum cans (used mostly by the cold beverage producers like the Coca Cola) which can be made in one piece, we still have to design our tin cans part-by-part. For each part, we have to prepare a corresponding production mould, which is somewhat no different from making other industrial products.”

“To start with, a metal sheet has to be prepared for cutting out the various parts of the tin can body. We have to make sure that all logos, graphic images and designs are imprinted on the sheet properly. These steps already take a lot of hard work,” Betty Lam started to explain the initial stage of production. The steps taken for printing images onto a metal sheet are similar to that of the general printing press. It involves such steps as color separation and drums printing. “The only difference is, for every colour layer printed on the metal sheet, it has to be blown dry by a 25-meter -long specialised oven. Unlike general paper printing, every colour layer must be ‘cemented’ firmly on the surface before proceeding to the next layer. It is really a job of tremendous time and care to ensure high quality,” elaborated by Betty Lam.

“Once we have finished imprinting all needed colour layers on the metal sheet, we then proceed to cut out the lids, the bodies and the bottoms. Again, it requires great care and effort to guarantee high precision,” Betty Lam continued.

Apart from the diversity in product designs, the prices of JEF’s products also vary significantly, from US$0.1 per unit to as much as US$4-5 per unit. Betty Lam pointed out that a tin box at a basic price of US$1 per unit is already considered high-end product.

Regarding JEF’s client profile, Betty Lam said, “Most of our clients are confectionaries, promotional companies and candies makers in Europe. In recent years, prestigious cigarette makers are also becoming our clients. It is especially a market of potential since smoking is globally discouraged and advertisements of cigarette products are banned in most countries. Many of these makers are taking an indirect advertising approach by putting their logos on the tin boxes that hold their cigarette products, to be re-packaged and sold as luxury gift items. They know that people may retain the boxes as souvenirs while the makers can get their commercial messages across.”

JEF currently still targets Europe as its major export market. European countries, such as Belgium and Italy, constitute as much as 60% of JEF’s exports. While the minimum order level for JEF’s products is set at 3,000 units, Betty Lam reveals that most of their clients place at least 10,000 units per order. Besides Europe, more orders also start coming from the confectioneries and promotional companies in the US.

Although JEF has built up a sound market base on European continent so far, Betty Lam still feels reservation on venturing into the Eastern European market. “Some merchants in Eastern Europe are still having difficulties in meeting payment, which is the very thing no business would like to risk. Eastern Europe still not ranks high on our market list at this moment.”

Betty Lam conceded that the immediate challenges for JEF are the fast-changing customers’ demand and the extremely tight production schedule. She said, “Most often, our customers issue their orders at the very last minutes, since they can only finalise packaging design for their products after the exhaustive decision flow. As a result, we are always left with a short lead time to work on actual production. For this reason, we always have to work in full capacity during the summer months from June to August, to cope with the seasonal surge in orders.”

At present, JEF operates MJ Tin Can Factory Limited as the company’s main production unit in Shenzhen, China.

Back