Filip Roose got roots in the printing. industry and together with his brother and father they started developing Slimbox some time ago – and now Slimbox is available – and in our humble opinion worth the wait. Take a look at Slimbox and listen to CEO Filip Roose – recorded at Argos Inspiration Days in Brussels.

So, Slimbox is really aiming to give you any kind of model or any kind of box, any kind of inlay maybe, with any dimension, that you wish or you need at that point. You can make a one-off, or you can make a whole series of boxes at the same time. It’s focused on SMEs so it doesn’t take up a lot of room. It’s very easy to use. You can use an app, you can use a web browser to work with, and you can even connect it to your P-system in your company, so you can fully automate the solution.

The only thing that you have to do physically is then input extra sheet of corrugated cardboard and the machine will automatically take in the sheet, see where it is, how big it is, how thick it is, and it will start cutting and then making all these boxes that you need. And then after a few moments it’ll come out, and you only have to fold the box, put in your goods, and off you go.

Well, together with my father, my father actually came up with the initial idea, and then he asked me and my brother, “Is it possible to help me? Because I’m not going to be able to make this machine completely myself,” and we looked at each other, and we said, “Just one machine, or maybe there’s a market? Let’s look into that.” And of course it appeared so, that there is a gigantic market actually, so we started working on it.

Yeah, it’s available in the market, right now we already have dealers in Belgium, where we’re from, of course, and then all the surrounding countries, and Poland. And we’re growing that circle. But we also have plans to move over to the states, and North America in general, since that’s probably, at least, our biggest market as far as we know.

The initial idea came from a printing company. We used to be a printing company, or my father ran a printing company, and so in the printing industry it is indeed interesting. But looking at what is happening today with e-commerce, there’s a gigantic market that is growing 20% year over year in e-commerce, and there’s a lot of smaller companies that need good packaging. Packaging, there’s been a lot of researches on how important packaging is to the end customer, and it’s very clear that there is an opportunity there. And nobody’s really doing something about it. What we had seen is that there are solutions for the large player, the large company, the large e-commerce companies, but there was nothing for SMEs. So we said, let’s try and target that one.

We do have a lot of extra features that can be connected to this machine. For instance, a scanner that makes it possible that you don’t have to enter your dimensions, simply press one button. Also an automatic feeder so that you can connect it to your web shop, or simply a machine that is actually not really focusing anymore on SMEs but on those larger companies. So anything is possible. We have, even, a lot of extra products that I can’t tell about right now up our sleeves, and that we will be developing in the upcoming months and years.