ICO, a leading company in the corrugated cardboard industry for the production of packaging and corrugated cardboard boxes in Italy, is today amongst the country's largest corrugated cardboard producers and a key reference point in the packaging market for central and southern Italy, as well as being amongst Europe's foremost companies for digital printing.
In a context where sustainability represents an essential necessity, packaging assumes an increasingly central role, fuelled by growing consumer awareness of "green" products, packaging and supply chains, and by the strong influence this awareness exerts on purchasing behaviour.
When JH Thompson patented corrugated cardboard in 1875 (so legend has it) to make boxes for transporting all manner of products, his contemporaries regarded it with disdain, unable to imagine that this would be possible with packaging made from paper.
Yet this is precisely what happened: industrialisation, and consequently consumerism, drove the packaging world to evolve in ways that were utterly unforeseeable at the beginning of the 1900s.
Packaging, initially essential and manufactured through various manual processes, became the product of automation with replicable production processes, owing to the automation of packaging plants that tolerate no imperfections; the need to communicate the brand with all its distinctive qualities subsequently became equally urgent.
From the early "fragile – handle with care" printing, accompanied at most by the company logo and produced using individual rubber stamps applied to printing cylinders, we now print everything on our boxes using flexographic systems pre-mounted in photopolymer or even digital printers: QR codes for websites, barcodes or RFID tags for logistics management, with the remainder being entirely visual storytelling that employs colours, shapes and design for immediate, profound and memorable communication.
