Packaging Innovations 2025: Aptar Beauty flags fragrance refills as incoming solution
19 Feb 2025 | Aptar Beauty
Aptar Beauty reflects on the growing demand for refillable solutions in the fragrance sector at Packaging Innovations 2025. We speak to Andy Knight, sales manager for the UK and ROI at Aptar Beauty, about its Nomad refill system. He also discusses the ongoing challenge of keeping up with global packaging regulations, leading to pressure on dispensing manufacturers.
This is Personal Care Insights reporting live from Packaging Innovations 2025 in the UK.
I'm at the Aptar Beauty booth with Andy Knight, the sales manager for the UK and Republic of Ireland.
Hi Andy, how are you?
Andy, in what ways are beauty and personal care trends influencing packaging?
I think you know the biggest influence we're seeing is with the requirements for more sustainability, whether that be refill, recyclability, what we have to understand is that many products, particularly in the personal care area, have been inherently recyclable for many years.
Lotion pumps have always been.
Be able to be re-screwed off of a bottle, bottles refilled, but what we're now seeing is the fragrance industry is trying to copy that.
There has been refill fragrance around for many years, but we're starting to see more and more customers coming to us looking for screw-on pumps rather than the traditional crimpon pumps.
Mhm.
And are regulatory constraints also part of current trends?
Definitely.
Obviously we have lots of issues that are coming from things like EPR.
Can we conform to fully recyclable, but also the materials that we're using in our pumps like have to be removed to make sure that we're conforming with the rules globally because we are a global manufacturer, so we have to keep an eye on anything that we do.
Develop or produce that is suitable for sale in other parts of the globe.
And what are some of your key highlights at the show this year?
Highlights, we've had some very impressive and very encouraging feedback from the people who've been on the stand.
The football, the footfall and the quality of the footfall has been amazing for us in the last couple of days.
A couple of products which have really grabbed attention have been our Neoropper, which is the next generation cosmetic dropper, and also our new Nomad refill system, which works alongside the refill bottles that we're starting to see move more and more into the fragrance market.
Now you already mentioned refillability.
Can you elaborate more on this aspect?
Reusable, refillable packaging is said to have much potential in the beauty industry.
How do you see the single use versus reusable packaging dynamic playing out here?
Personally, in my opinion, a lot of it comes from the consumer.
So if you look at, for instance, with the fragrance.
When you're investing a lot of money in a fragrance, we all like to shop for our fragrances.
We test many ones before we come out.
Making a decision on a fragrance and then going back to the same fragrance to refill it is really a consumer decision.
So I think it really is down to the brand managers or the owners of those fragrances to encourage the brand loyalty.
Aptar are here and we're able to support with regards to trend information and the products that we produce, to make that happen.
Now when we spoke earlier, you mentioned that refillability is a bit more suitable for some products than others.
Can you elaborate on this a bit more?
I think, you know, if you, if you look at for instance, a, a traditional lotion pump, these pumps have always been the same.
There have been customers like Body Shop and other refill solutions in the market where it's been very easy to go in, buy a bottle, fill it with a shampoo.
And then reuse your pump, very, very simply.
They don't have that with fragrance, there are some fragrance places where you can go and refill a bottle, but that's not widely in the UK.
You tend to have to find your brand and buy the solution with a cap on it.
And a lot of the bigger players who already had custom bottles that they had, they could adapt to refillability, are there, but it's been around finding standard bottles to go with pumps, which have which would allow the rest of the fragrance market to move into that area.
Right, and.
And, in what ways might new waste management regulations such as the EU's PR or the UK's impact beauty or personal care packaging?
The pressure is on us as manufacturers of dispensing systems because Technically, to produce a pump from a monorial which would allow you to be able to claim full recyclability can be achieved and within APTA we have a fully recyclable lotion pump with our future pump, but other parts of our range we're having to use mixed materials, and for instance in the UK there's a requirement for a 90/10 split between a package to have PE and PP and whilst that's achievable.
It may actually be at the sacrifice of getting the function that you want to get out of a pack, so it's, it's a challenge, and it's an ongoing challenge that we have, particularly as perhaps UK rules are slightly different to the ones that we have in Europe, and making sure they are, they're aligning is it's a daily question, so it keeps us interested.
It's very interesting.
Thanks for speaking to Per.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
