Made in Connecticut: Curtis Packaging produces luxury boxes for top global brands
Premium quality is thanks in part to this state-of-the-art printer — part of the company’s $26 million, six-year capital improvement plan.
More Stories
At Curtis Packaging in Sandy Hook, they make boxes as luxurious as the products they protect.
"We work with Lindt and Ghirardelli, Titleist, Jim Beam, and Brown-Forman — the parent company of Jack Daniel’s," says Don Droppo, Jr., President and CEO. “We’re the extension of the brand, so everything has to be perfect. Everything needs to be absolutely meticulous.”
Premium quality is thanks in part to this state-of-the-art printer — part of the company’s $26 million, six-year capital improvement plan. The printer is bigger than a locomotive. It runs at 15,000 sheets an hour, photographs the color bars on every single sheet, and can make corrections on the fly after just ten sheets — all while operating at speeds up to 50,000 sheets per hour.
It’s a far cry from Curtis’s beginnings in Sandy Hook in 1845. Samuel Curtis founded the company in the very location where it still stands today. For the first 50 years, it manufactured buttons and combs made of horse hooves, antlers, and horns. But when the cattle industry moved west and affordable raw materials became scarce, Curtis pivoted to mass-producing the boxes for those combs and buttons.
Today the company produces around 400 million cartons annually — more than one box for every person in the United States. All of it is done in a zero-waste-to-landfill facility where any excess is recycled.
The process starts with prepress proofs and printing plates etched by lasers. Next comes the cutting die, which puts scores in the material so it can be folded into a box. Everything is manufactured right here at Curtis.
Some of the boxes are so ornate they require the expertise of a structural engineer.
It’s the attention to detail from every employee that sets Curtis apart. That’s just one reason Titleist trusts the company to produce 100 million golf ball cartons a year.
“The tenacity, the creativity — it’s that every individual cares about what they do,” says Droppo.
