How to Ensure Your Cosmetic Packaging Meets Quality Control
Quality control in the cosmetic packaging industry is extremely important to ensuring your products’ safety and effectiveness. Most companies focus their efforts on the actual product itself, but they often forget about all of the peripheral materials used in getting that product onto store shelves or into customers’ hands, like boxes, labels, and cosmetic packaging. These items may seem like trivial details, but if they fail to meet quality control standards, it can lead to serious problems down the road. Here are some helpful tips on how to ensure your cosmetic packaging meets quality control standards.
What is AQL standard?
Usually Acceptable Quality Level (AQL) is a common quality standard used by quality control personnel, particularly in industries that involve inspection of products for defects or conformance to specifications. It may also be known as Maximum Allowable Defects (MAD). The AQL determines how many defective items are allowed per thousand in order for a shipment of goods to be considered acceptable by an inspector. By calculating AQL, you can determine how many bad pieces there must be in each thousand pieces in order for your cosmetic packaging supplier to consider it unacceptable. For example, if your AQL is set at 2%, then not more than 2 out of every 1,000 items may be defective; i.e., 98% are good.
What is ISO International Organization for Standardization?
ISO is a set of standards for all types of product quality. It’s comprised of more than 160 countries and is an important tool in ensuring manufacturing quality, especially when it comes to packaging. The ISO establishes AQL—acceptance quality limit—standards for packaging manufacturers, which are used by government agencies around the world as well as organizations such as CPSC (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission). The minimum requirements outlined by ISO 9001 auditing help ensure your packages will be safe and up to par with those used by other cosmetic brands. Here are some suggestions that will ensure your products meet AQL standards
Why Quality Control is Important?
At first glance, it may seem like setting AQL standards for cosmetics packaging would be a bit overkill. The reason for that is there are hardly any safety concerns when it comes to cosmetics packaging, especially when compared with other industries. With that said, your customers want a quality product that doesn’t fall apart or get all cracked and gross after a week or two of use. If you choose cheap materials and poor manufacturing techniques, you risk losing out on profits from upset customers who demand full refunds because their products don’t work as advertised.
Who Should Practice Good Quality Control Practices?
Anyone who is producing a physical product should practice good Quality inspection services or practices. This includes manufacturers, wholesalers, resellers and anyone else that has their hands on your products during processing or packaging. No matter how skilled you are at making products, if you don’t have quality control processes in place to check for errors, you could end up with hundreds of pounds of flawed goods every year. This translates into an enormous waste of time and money that’s also bad for your business reputation.
Conclusion
The AQL, or acceptable quality level, is an industry-standard that determines how many defective items must be found within a sampling size before they are considered not conforming to quality control. While determining your AQL can be difficult, there are some very easy ways of finding out what standard you should set.
The first step is determining whether you plan on selling your product on a local or national level. If it’s local, an AQL of 60 is often acceptable; however, if it’s nationally distributed, an AQL of 95 or above is recommended. Next, determine whether your product will compete with other similar products in its market niche. Products that will compete with higher-end brands might require stricter adherence to quality control than cheaper alternatives.
