Perfect Packers, a corrugated packaging specialist for the footwear industry, was set up by brothers Ankur and Vikas Mahajan in 1995. Starting with the production of about 500 shoe boxes a day, the packaging company moved into its current 20,000-square-foot premises in Artoni in 2014. Its current daily production capacity is 1.25 lakh corrugated shoe boxes.
According to Vikas Mahajan, Perfect Packers provides complete corrugated shoe box packaging solutions, including tissue papers, outer cartons, hand tags, and box labels. The footwear packaging specialist supplies to domestic and international brands such as Zara, Bata, Skechers, Asics, MNG, Hush Puppies, Gent, and Spykar. It also exports corrugated shoe boxes to Bangladesh with some yearly orders to Thailand and South Africa. Rigid boxes have also been produced since 2018.
Though many Indian footwear startups also approach the company, Mahajan explains that it operates on minimum order quantities of 5,000 shoe boxes. However, it has supplied upwards of 50,000 shoe boxes to domestic startups, The Souled Store and Frido.
Corrugated shoe boxes mainly go to footwear companies in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, and Chennai. Perfect Packers has been certified by the Confederation of Indian Footwear Industries for the best corrugated shoe box packaging in Agra.
The corrugation box printer and converter recently added a DGM Technocut 1050S automatic diecutter to its earlier fleet of 11 manual diecutters. Mahajan says that he is ‘100% satisfied’ with the DGM machine, which has given a big boost to their operations – it has been a healthy growth supplement.
Apart from the DGM die-cutter, Perfect Packers has four 5-color German Planeta presses, a flexo reel printing machine from Prakash, a 4-color Heidelberg Speedmaster with coater, an Ample, and three Natraj machines for corrugation and two lamination machines from Youbond Machinery. It has a Konica Minolta digital press for labels. The ancillary equipment for cutting, varnishing, and logistics is on hand in the plant. Mahajan points to the Heidelberg press as productive with good print quality.
Since the plant seems to be labor-intensive and employs 300 people, Mahajan says both the lack of trained manpower and automation are challenges. “Going forward, we plan to focus more on automated machines to enhance efficiencies. We want to automate our plant operations.”
At times, there are payment-related issues with buyers regarding credit limits, although they face little to no competition when working directly with buyers. The Iran war, he said, has led to increased credit costs for raw material supplies such as ink, paper, and lamination. “Going forward, we want to focus more on automating our plant operations,” Mahajan concluded.
Duplex board, art paper, and kappa board inputs for manufacturing are available in a variety of grades, such as low, medium, upper, and high, from both Indian and imported mills and suppliers, and the company has a dedicated quality control team to manage the variety of grades and grammages. Paper and board are acquired from a spectrum of domestic mills including Siddharth Papers, Devpriya Paper Mill, Sahota Paper Mill, Genus Paper Mill, Divya Shakti Paper Mill, Edicon Paper Mill, JK Ultima, Vishwanath Paper & Boards, Chadha Paper Mill, United Paper Mills, Shree Venktesh Paper Mills, Paswara Papers, KM Papers, Cheema Papers, MLM, Line Craft, Tirupati Kraft Paper and Paper Vintage Point.
