Water bottle once it is filled with five gallons of water weighs fifty pounds.
In July 2008 Absopure Water Company published A Century of Quality Refreshment. This is a story of one of the first ice delivery companies providing quality ice from an underwater spring outside of Detroit, then later providing water in five-gallon glass water bottles to home and businesses throughout Detroit.
Plastipak’s founding in 1967 began with a need to provide a solution to what had become a serious challenge—those heavy five-gallon jugs used to deliver water. With a full load of water in them, these five-gallon jugs weighed 50 pounds and required superior strength to manage. Plastic seemed the ideal solution. From that simple problem-solving solution, Plastipak now has manufacturing plants and operations across North and South American and Europe.
Because Bookhouse had illustrated and told the Absopure story so well, Plastipak reached out to Bookhouse in March of 2016 and asked us to illustrate and tell Plastipak’s 50 year story. Plymouth, Michigan based Plastipak Packaging, Inc., is a global leader in providing a wide range of innovative and creative packaging solutions. Michigan Born, Global Impact is a story of impressive growth through its commitment to improve its products, and an ongoing commitment to innovation and excellence. Its 50-year journey includes a history of notable firsts and impressive achievements. Plastipak is also deeply committed to shrinking the company’s environmental footprint through various “earth-friendly” initiatives.
Donna Brooks
Marty Hohmann
An agreement between Plastipak and Bookhouse was reached in April of 2016, and Red Clay Editorial Services was selected to write for this project. Red Clay is a team of two writers, Marty Hohmann and Donna Brooks. This would be Red Clay’s third project with Bookhouse. They went to Michigan in June to start the interview process, and delivered the outline for the book in July, and the complete manuscript in October of 2016.
You can’t tell the Plastipak story without talking about the Plastipak culture—a culture developed by a core group who came together to create something special and revolutionary. The hallmarks of that culture are integrity, respect, loyalty, relationship, and a hard work, can-do attitude. The results speak for themselves.
Using the outline as the text and some images that Plastipak sent to Bookhouse, Rick Korab, our designer extraordinare, designed the prototypes in August, which Plastipak chose in October.
Thomas S. England
Renée Peyton, Bookhouse’s archivist and all around Jill of all trades, went to Plymouth for archival research in October. As robust as Absopure’s archives were, Plastipak’s were lacking. but we found enough illustrate the founding years. Because we knew that this was going to be the case we sent a photographer, Tom England, who has shot for Bookhouse for over ten years, to photograph Plastipak’s various locations in and around Michigan in August.
Rick Korab
Once the manuscript was copyedited, and all of the images were gathered, Rick designed the book in November. This is where most projects become stalled. Committees or the CEO start wanting to be more involved, and the review periods become longer. Plastipak was no exception, but this is a good thing, because Bookhouse wants to make sure that the client has the most perfect product we can produce. The design was approved, after several rounds of revisions, mostly photo swaps, and fact checking changes, in February of 2017.
Jim Grover shooting the preflight of the Plastipak book.
This book was printed at Bang Printing in Brainerd, Minnesota. Bang has been printing for Bookhouse since 2014. Renée went on the press check for this book, March 1. We took the opportunity while we were there to film the printing and binding process. Stay tuned for that video.
Today, Plastipak is an international, industry-leading multibillion-dollar corporation with fifty years of innovation and patented technology in the annals of its history. Employees, their families and friends and clients of Plastipak who were eagerly awaiting publication of this exciting corporate history, received their books the week of March 28, 2017.