Havens Kitchen (Laminex) – Stylish Kitchens Made quick and Easy

Havens Kitchen brings simplicity, convenience, speed and good old Aussie know-how to your kitchens through their cutting-age and market leading pre-assembled kitchen solutions.

Havens Kitchen believe the kitchen is the focal point of the home – a place to be together and bond with your loved ones. Therefore, it should be designed for easy navigation within a collaborative space. This allows you to enjoy an on-trend, high-quality kitchen experience with your friends and family.

Kitchen Haven offers all inclusive, first-of-its-kind kitchen cabinets in Australia – designed and built to get your new kitchen up and running, quickly! This includes appliances, sinks, taps, handles etc.

The Brief

Laminex is an important client of Kitchen Haven, manufacturing panels that are included in the high-quality kitchen cabinets they produce. These panels are an essential part of their range of offerings – allowing tradesmen to efficiently gather all essential components of the kitchen plan in under thirty minutes at any Haven Hub. Such as door panels, carcasses, base and wall units, including white goods.

As such it was challenging to find packaging solutions that were easy to assemble, cost-effective and at the same time could be used for the wide range of panels and skews.

The Process

We collaborated with Haven Kitchen every step of the way, taking several trips to Ballarat to collect samples to trial our designs in situ and test performance during delivery.

Our expertise in packaging and design allowed us to create a solution to fit all Laminex’s requirements – efficient, effective, and protective.

There were around thirty different products in the range, for which we created samples and converted into packaging solutions, gaining final approval and complete satisfaction from the Laminex team.

The Challenge

To create packaging for over 30 products, in a cost-effective manner with additional requirements to ensure the packaging displays the products and is easy for the handling team to pack/unpack.

To remain competitive, it was also important for the packaging costs to be minimal.

At first, the client wanted a standardised design that could be applied across all products to minimise the complexity and number of designs required.

However, they soon decided to create individual packaging for each product to simplify the work for their handling team. PPI sampled designs for over 30 products, which made the process more challenging for us.

Since this was a first for Laminex, it was our responsibility to guide them and help them make packaging decisions that would be beneficial for their business in the short and long term.

We project managed the design and trial phase of the packaging, to create a total packaging solution, without impacting our client’s otherwise hectic schedules.

The Solution

Working closely with the Havens Kitchen team, we developed a range of custom corrugated packaging solutions designed to protect cabinetry components throughout storage, transport and installation.

Rather than treating each product as a standalone packaging project, we reviewed the product range as a whole to identify opportunities for standardisation. By incorporating modular design principles and introducing multiple score (crease) lines into selected pack designs, a single packaging format could accommodate different panel configurations, including single, double and triple panels.

This approach reduced the number of unique packaging formats required while maintaining a secure fit, making the range easier to manage, quicker to pack and simpler to scale as production volumes increased.

Results

The new packaging system reduced the range from 30 packaging SKUs to 15, significantly simplifying packaging management across the business.

With fewer packaging specifications to procure, stock and manage, Havens Kitchen benefited from a more efficient packaging operation without compromising product protection. The modular designs improved packing consistency, reduced inventory complexity and created a packaging system that was easier to maintain as the product range evolved.