Visual Presentations Hawaii reached out to Cope Plastics, Inc. in search of high-quality materials to create luxury storefront displays for Louis Vuitton stores in Oahu, Maui and New York City.

Cope Plastics worked closely with Visual Presentations Hawaii to understand their vision and specific design needs: eye-catching, durable materials that align with the fashion house’s iconic branding and entice customers to the store. Aesthetic versatility was a top priority for Visual Presentations, making acrylic an ideal choice. After reviewing multiple color options, they selected 2424 blue acrylic and mirrored acrylic.

Acrylic is a top choice in retail environments, being lightweight and shatter-resistant makes it safer and easier to install in high-traffic retail environments. Additionally, acrylic is highly customizable and can be custom-shaped to fit any brand’s retail display specifications.

But this project didn’t end after the material selection — seamless delivery to Hawaii on a tight pre-holiday deadline was required. Cope Plastics researched logistics providers, compared transit times and pricing to help the customer make their deadline.

Cope Plastics’ high-quality acrylic sheets, combined with Visual Presentations Hawaii’s creativity, resulted in elegant, high-impact displays that captured the essence of Louis Vuitton while elevating the luxury shopping experience.

This project highlights the growing role of plastics in luxury retail. While plastics are often associated with medical tools, machinery and industrial applications, they are also becoming a key component in high-end artistic and interactive displays. www.copeplastics.com

Craftech Industries, Inc. was recently called on to make a 10-32 lock nut in nylon. Millions, if not billions of 10-32 nylon nuts are manufactured every year with a low-tech process, but this customer, a major aerospace company, required that the injection molded nuts must meet a very tight range of torque and that they must retain similar torque retention characteristics over five separate tightenings and loosenings. The customer provided the length of locking threads needed in the nut, and Craftech Industries went to work employing empirical methods and their extensive industry experience to determine the exact amount of thread to remove from the nuts in order to meet the torque retention requirements.

Threaded mandrels were made and repeatedly coated, stripped and re-coated until the correct results were obtained. When the product specifications were met, Craftech Industries created a sixteen-cavity tool, allowing a high number of the lock nuts to be produced efficiently. With the creation of the sixteen-cavity tool, a new challenge was presented — each cavity had to see similar pressures and needed to cure similarly in order to achieve equal results for every cavity. To ensure this, the company designed runners to allow material to circulate in and fill all around the cavities.

With these challenges addressed, Craftech Industries transformed a standard product into a custom-made solution meeting stringent aerospace requirements. www.craftechind.com