Industry: Packaging and Containers Manufacturing | Founded: 1864 | Headquarters: Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Challenge: Sales catalogs for six market segments, each built by hand in a design tool, taking hours per document and impossible to update quickly.
Solution: A workflow where the marketing team uploads one Excel data file per catalog and receives print-ready and digital InDesign output, with layouts, tables, icons, and table of contents assembled automatically.
Amcor is an American-Australian global packaging company that develops and produces flexible packaging, rigid containers, specialty cartons, and closures. Its Rigid Plastics segment is one of the world’s largest suppliers of rigid plastic packaging, serving markets as different as food, healthcare, dairy, and spirits — each with its own catalog, its own product tables, and its own visual identity.
Why Manual Catalog Production Stopped Scaling
Amcor Rigid Packaging came to Pagination after an internal review aimed at speeding up the creation of sales collateral and reducing time to market. At the time the team built documents in Canva and published them online through Issuu. Canva produced good-looking documents, but each one took many hours of work — and after a round of product updates the file could no longer be edited there, so the catalog had to be patched in Adobe Acrobat instead.
That is the point where manual production stops being a design problem and becomes an operational one. A catalog that cannot be regenerated is a catalog that ages: prices, SKUs, and certifications drift away from the document while nobody has the hours to rebuild it.
The Data Structure That Came Before The Template
The first request was a quote to automate the latest catalog. The first finding was that the catalog could not be built from the data as it was: several category fields were missing, and without them the sections could not be assembled correctly. So Pagination started from the data rather than the layout, developing a sample data structure that Amcor kept as the master file for every catalog that followed. Getting that structure right once is what made the later catalogs cheap: same columns, same logic, a different product list.
With the structure settled, Amcor engaged a design agency to revamp the look of its catalogs. Requirements and levels of automation were agreed in a joint meeting between Amcor, the agency, and Pagination, so the creative work and the automation rules were defined together rather than in sequence. When the final InDesign template arrived, Pagination completed the automation within days and gave Amcor 24/7 access to the service.
From One Data File To A Finished Catalog
The team uploads one file per catalog and everything below is assembled from it. A run normally returns in minutes:
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Page layouts | Multiple layouts can be mixed inside the same catalog; a position number in the data file decides exactly where each product sits on the page |
| Product tables | A fixed table format sits next to the main product image, driven by the same file |
| Images in free positions | A dedicated layout drops a chart or a photo into an empty slot by naming the file in the image column — no layout work needed |
| Icons | Certification and feature icons are placed from dedicated columns, at fixed sizes per layout, so every page treats them identically |
| Section colours | The colour applied to a section’s first page is picked from the data file and reused in the table of contents |
| Section spreads | Sections can open on either the left or the right page, with no blank filler pages inserted |
| Table of contents | Section titles and page numbers are generated automatically (see below) |
| Print and digital output | Each run produces the standard PDF plus a _print version with bleed and crop marks, ready for the printer |
| Data validation | The file is checked before production: missing categories or wrong page numbers come back as an error report instead of a broken catalog |
Automating A Table Of Contents The Design Team Still Controls
The table of contents was the hardest part to automate, because Amcor wanted to keep the freedom to redesign that page whenever it liked.
The solution splits the two concerns. The agency designs the TOC page as a normal InDesign file and leaves an empty frame named toc; Amcor uploads that file to the Pagination Cloud; the automation fills the frame with the current section titles, page numbers, and section colours, which vary with each product assortment. Design owns the look, the data owns the content, and neither has to wait for the other.
Six Catalogs, One Workflow
The same setup produces the catalogs for every market the business unit sells into — Food, Healthcare, Home & Personal Care, Dairy, Spirits & Wine, and Beverage. Each new segment reused the master data structure and the existing layouts, so the second, third, and sixth catalog cost a fraction of the first. Inside each one, the split between fixed design and generated content is always the same:
| Catalog page | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Cover | An InDesign file uploaded by the team, or generated from title, subtitle, and image columns |
| Index spread | An InDesign page with an empty toc frame, filled automatically |
| Intro and value proposition | Fixed InDesign pages |
| Category opening pages | One InDesign file per category, placed automatically at the start of its section |
| Product pages | Generated row by row from the Excel file |
| Back cover | Fixed InDesign page |
What Automation Changed For Catalog Production
- Hours became a file upload: producing a catalog no longer means rebuilding a document; it means updating the Excel file and launching the run.
- The team stays independent: layout positions, section colours, covers, and the product assortment are all controlled from the data file, without going back to the agency for every change.
- One source, two outputs: the same run delivers the online version and the print version with bleed marks.
- A workflow that lasted: the catalogs went into production in 2021 and the project is still active years later, with users added as the team changes.
Key Takeaways For Teams Producing Multiple Catalogs
Amcor’s result came from the least glamorous part of the project: agreeing the data structure before anyone designed a page. Once the columns were fixed, six catalogs became variations of one workflow instead of six separate jobs — and the design agency kept control of the look without becoming a bottleneck for every update.
You can use Pagination to automatically create beautiful documents in just a few seconds that are always ready for print or digital distribution.
