A Graphic Designer's dream day out
Founded in 1845 and still family-owned, James Cropper has quietly evolved from a traditional paper mill into an exciting materials innovator. Paper, packaging and sustainability, they’re right at that intersection.
Driving through Burneside, you can feel the history of the place. The mill isn’t just part of the village – it basically is the village. We were told there are generations of villagers that have worked in the mill and there is a strong heritage for the craft of paper making. That heritage is reflected in the way people talk about the place, the way they move around it, the obvious pride in what gets made here.
We started suited up in full PPE and headed straight into the pulp store. Towers of raw material stacked ceiling-high was impressive enough, but the thing that really got us was the neighbouring warehouse. Bales and bales of used paper coffee cups, familiar high street logos poking through the packaging. Like most people, we’d always assumed those cups were a recycling dead end. Not for Croppers! The cups are broken down, the coatings stripped away, and what you’re left with is high-quality fibre, not destined for landfill but for premium recycled paper stock. Yesterday’s throwaway cup, tomorrow’s luxury packaging.
Next we met Mark. Colour specialist and quite possibly the most enthusiastic person we came across. He made a sheet of paper in front of us within about ten minutes of meeting him, which set the tone nicely.
But it was the colour stuff that really got us going. Mark walked us through how the same colour behaves completely differently depending on the surface it lands on – how weight, texture and finish can make an identical shade read completely differently. He showed us pigments that shift noticeably under different light sources, colours that look one thing under tungsten and something else entirely in daylight.
After lunch we were back on the mill floor, the scale of the paper making process becoming very apparent. Raw pulp fed into enormous tanks, churned to a thick almost cottage-cheese consistency, then driven through a sequence of ginormous machines. By the end of the line, we’ve got massive reels of beautiful paper, packaged up by the tonne. It’s industrial, but how they talk about it so passionately makes it a craft.
The day finished with a visit to Colourform – watching paper get pressed and moulded into plastic-free packaging. Bottle sleeves for champagne and whisky, moulds for lipsticks and perfumes. Learning about the precision and engineering required to make this packaging was fascinating!
As a studio we spend a lot of time thinking about how things look and feel on screen. Days like this are a useful reminder that the materials we put in front of clients matter just as much – not only aesthetically but ethically too. There’s a real opportunity there for the brands we work with to be more deliberate about what carries their name and to tell stories through the physical things people hold in their hands.
