After 114 years, packaging company’s innovation spawns a diverse client base
Boxes are ubiquitous.
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Just about everything we buy, ship or store begins or ends its useful life in one of them – which is why the Mason Box Company in North Attleboro continues to thrive, more than a century after it was founded in a family barn in the final decade of the 19th century.
The barn has long since vanished, but the much-enlarged manufacturing plant is still located on the same patch of ground, its décor, external and internal, an interesting mixture of modernity and 19th century tradition. The plant now covers 98,000 square feet, much of it warehouse space. In addition, there’s a 68,000-square-foot satellite plant in Taunton.
Tradition aside, the product line, broad enough to service 13,000 accounts, is both state-of-the-art and sufficiently eclectic to serve customers who deal in every imaginable commodity from chocolates to funerals.
“We are the world’s largest manufacturer of rigid setup mailing boxes,” said President Hugh Mason. Which means it’s delivered as a completed box, requiring no folding.
Founded in 1891 by brothers J. Frank and Charles O. Mason, the company’s original mission was to serve the jewelry industry. It continues to fill that role, providing containers for the world’s most prestigious jewelry companies. The jewelry containers come in a variety of styles, including plush velvet and suede.
But Mason boxes are also used to store and ship candies, medical laboratory slides and vials, optical products, greeting cards and gift certificates. The company also provides a mix of packaging accessories, including self-sealing bubble-cushioned mailers, sealing tape and butterfly bows.
Besides introducing new developments in product and production machinery, the company has also responded to a sea of changes in the shipping industry.
“Before the advent of Federal Express and UPS,” Mason recalled, “jewelry products were shipped by registered mail. FedEx and UPS had an impact, and we had to change.”
Out of that circumstance came a Mason innovation called the Mailmaster shipping container. It immediately caught on.
As for its connection with the funeral industry, Mason Box meets two separate needs: one is a velvet bag that mortuaries use to contain the personal possessions of the deceased; the other is an urn bag that’s used to store cremated remains.
Mason recalled creating the urn bag for burials at sea: “We made the bags and put the Navy or Coast Guard seals on them,” he said.
The remains were then placed in containers for burial.
“Now we ship 25,000 urn bags a year.”
Another innovation: the creation of containers for shipping medical slides safely and securely.
Slides previously had simply been wrapped in paper towels and sent to laboratories for processing. The new, heavy-duty Mailmaster boxes feature cushioned inserts that hold slides securely in numbered slots. They also feature re-closable wire fasteners at either end to help secure the slides during shipment.
Traditional though the company may be, its identity has given rise to one oddity: Hugh Mason is no relation to the founding brothers. It seems that neither J. Frank nor Charles Mason had children. Coincidentally, they hired a salesman named Bonner Mason in 1905, and Bonner’s son, Robert, a civil engineer, came onboard a generation later.
In time, Robert became president, and son Hugh joined the company as a salesman in 1969, eventually succeeding his father as president.
Besides introducing new products, Mason Box has changed both its marketing and manufacturing strategies to meet the age of electronics. In manufacturing, the company relies on computers to handle certain production steps more rapidly and automatically. And it uses the Internet to acquire and process orders, about half of which originate from the company’s glossy catalogs.
From its origins in a family barn more than a century ago, Mason Box has forged a strong identity in its industry. According to Mason, the company sells its products in all 50 states, as well as Israel, Canada and Puerto Rico. It sells its rigid setup, cotton-filled jewelry boxes and its security boxes by the millions.
And it does so with a staff that remains constant from year to year and decade to decade.
“We have no turnover,” Mason said.
As evidence, consider the case of Owen Johnson. He joined the company during his high school years back in the ’40s, did a stint in the Army, then returned to his post as a paper cutter. He’s been at it for 55 years, remains in good health and when you ask him about his plans for retirement, he just smiles. Calling it quits, it seems, just isn’t on his radar.
