Getting to this point has been an intense three-year process for Ms Fowler-Drake, who has a strong design background and had built up her own children's clothing firm before stepping in to take over the family firm.She added: "When you re-shape a business like this you bring it down like a house of cards and start reinventing it."We are very focused on social media and are looking at new ways of doing things and new ways of communicating with brands."She added: "This year we will have grown, the change has all been done and now we're at the exciting stage - 2014 is going to be very exciting."The company is currently working on ten potential contracts with major brands, and if just a portion of them come to fruition it will mean substantial growth.
Biomimetics is the practice of emulating nature to achieve some goal in engineering. It's based on the idea that evolution, with the billions of years it has had to invent and refine ideas, has come up with all kinds of solutions we could stand to learn. This often comes on the largest and the smallest scales,Cigarette firms prepare for new ad, packaging
copying whole body plans for robot movement strategies, and molecular structures for non-slip coatings and the like. But now, something in between: a new packaging material is being designed after the pomelo fruit.
In particular, the packaging material is being designed after the rind of the pomelo. Despite being quite heavy for fruit, often topping two kilograms, pomelo have to survive falls from as high as 10 meters to most effectively deliver their seeds. As a result, the soft and squishable meat of the fruit is protected with a thick, spongy outer peel. A regular supermarket orange has a peel that's perhaps five millimeters thick; a pomelo's can be inches thick, and account of a huge proportion of its overall size.Safety materials are the most likely application for this sort of technology.Safety materials are the most likely application for this sort of technology.That fall protection is essentially packaging science — and we do packaging science already. So researchers from several universities in Germany looked at the pomelo fruit for inspiration. The peel is essentially a foam, reinforced with strong fiber molecules.