A proprietary polyolefin introduced by Kranson Industries (St. Louis, MO), the VelvaSoft material is coextrusion-blown with high-density polyethylene to give the Ice Cap bottle a unique texture. Graham-Webb is using it for seven of the 15 SKUs in the Ice Cap line, primarily the shampoos and conditioners. The bottles are in 8-, 16- and 32-oz sizes that retail for $7.95 to $11.95. "It adds a nice touch, almost a soft, rubbery feel to the product," says Diane Polzin, director of purchasing at Graham-Webb. The bottles also have a frosted look. "We'd always looked for a frosted bottle," Polzin continues, "but the treatments out there are usually spray-frosted, and they're quite expensive." The bottles consist of only 10% VelvaSoft and 90% HDPE, so where bottle costs and recycling are concerned, it's almost as if the bottles were monolayer HDPE, says Kranson. Owens-Brockway (Toledo, OH) coextrusion blows the bottles with tooling used for conventional HDPE bottles. They're screen-printed in blue, with silver hot-stamping. Seaquist Closures (Mukwonago, WI) provides the PP disc-top closure.
