Intertape Polymer Group Brand Guidelines: The 1981 Montreal Tape Maker Now Owned by Clearlake

A Montreal tape seller that grew by buying plants.

Intertape Polymer Group began in Montreal. English Wikipedia says Melbourne F. Yull started the business there in 1981, and that the company was incorporated in its present form in 1993. At first it sold tape in a small area, the encyclopedia says, and then grew quickly through acquisitions into a maker of paper- and film-based pressure-sensitive tapes and water-activated tape for sealing cartons.

The 1990s were good years for the business, according to Wikipedia, but the downturn of the early 2000s and competition from Asia hurt it, and the 2008 recession set it back again. In 2010 Yull’s son Greg Yull took over as chief executive. Under him the company closed plants, among them Brantford, Ontario, in 2011 and Richmond, Kentucky, in 2012, and moved shrink-film production from Truro, Nova Scotia, to Tremonton, Utah, in 2012, Wikipedia says.

The company kept two bases. Its Canadian head office stayed in Montreal, while its American head office moved in 2013 from Bradenton, Florida, to an office park in Sarasota, according to Wikipedia. When the company went private in 2022, its own release still described it as headquartered in both Montreal and Sarasota; its website today names Sarasota as its headquarters.

Tapes, films and the machines that apply them.

IPG describes itself as a provider of packaging and protective solutions. The company says it develops, makes and sells paper and film-based pressure-sensitive and water-activated tapes, stretch and shrink films, protective packaging, woven and non-woven products and packaging machinery.

Much of that range arrived by acquisition. Wikipedia records the purchase in 2015 of Better Packages of Ansonia, Connecticut, a maker of tape dispensers founded in 1917, and of RJM Manufacturing in Pennsylvania, maker of TaraTape filament and pressure-sensitive tapes. In July 2017 IPG completed the acquisition of Cantech, the Montreal supplier of industrial and specialty tapes. In 2016 it announced a new plant in Midland, North Carolina, for water-activated tape, which it had been making in Menasha, Wisconsin.

The company’s list of locations shows how widely the group is now spread: plants and offices across the United States and Canada, sites in India under the Capstone and IPG Asia names, Nuevopak in Jiangmen, China, Fibope near Porto in Portugal, and sites in Flensburg, Germany, and Widnes, England. Several acquired names, including Better Packages and Cantech, still appear on that list beside their towns.

In June 2024 IPG said it had been named “Large Enterprise Manufacturer of the Year” by the Manufacturing Leadership Council of the US National Association of Manufacturers, for its work on digital tools and training in its factories. The award was presented at the council’s twentieth annual ceremony, held in Florida that month, and the same release said IPG had also won the category for sustainability and the circular economy.

One launch was aimed at online sellers. In May 2021 the company announced the Curby Mini-Taper, a small manual dispenser for water-activated tape that it described as meant for small or new online retailers, sold with its own Curby water-activated tape; the company said it was committed to offering packaging products that can be recycled at the kerbside.

How tape and strapping makers present themselves.

The makers in this guide sell much of their range to people who use tape and strapping at work: warehouse teams sealing cartons, packers securing pallets, contractors masking a wall or sealing a duct. Their catalogues tend to be organised around jobs and materials. Shurtape’s industrial website, for example, sorts its range by trade — construction, HVAC, packaging, marine — while IPG lists pressure-sensitive and water-activated tapes, stretch and shrink films and packaging machinery side by side.

That gives the category a recognisable set of pictures for a designer to study: rolls of tape on their cardboard cores, often stacked by colour or width; cartons running through a case sealer at the end of a packing line; steel or plastic strapping drawn tight around a loaded pallet with a hand tool or a machine; and close-ups of an adhesive face or a cut edge. Some makers, Shurtape among them, give their trade tapes short codes of letters and numbers rather than names.

The trade also meets in person. PMMI’s Pack Expo shows in the United States, interpack in Düsseldorf and FachPack in Nuremberg, which held its 2025 edition in September, gather makers of packaging materials, tapes, strapping and the machines that apply them together, and a maker’s stand there is one of the places its identity is seen at full size.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not any maker’s official palette.

A Clearlake-owned group that keeps buying.

Intertape stopped being a listed company in 2022. On 28 June 2022 an affiliate of the private-equity firm Clearlake Capital Group completed its purchase of all of IPG’s shares through a plan of arrangement under Canadian corporate law, and the shares were to be removed from the Toronto Stock Exchange, the company announced; Rubber World reported the completion in July 2022.

A new chief executive followed. In November 2022 IPG named Peter Durette, formerly president of the corrugated packaging business at the packaging group WestRock, as chief executive, describing the appointment as the start of a new phase after the take-private deal. Greg Yull retired from full-time duties after more than 30 years at the company, 12 of them as chief executive, and stayed on as a board adviser, the company said.

Under Clearlake the group has continued to add businesses. On 1 October 2026 IPG announced that it had bought Clysar, a maker of polyolefin shrink film in Clinton, Iowa, established in 1963. The company said Clysar would trade as “Clysar, an IPG Company” and that its brand would sit beside IPG’s own Exlfilm shrink-film brand, giving the group two established names in that category. Clearlake, which says it was founded in 2006 and has offices in Santa Monica and Dallas, described IPG in the same release as a packaging and specialty materials business it intends to keep building.

The name has shortened along the way. The company’s website and recent releases mostly use IPG, with “Intertape Polymer Group” added in brackets or written in full in formal announcements.

For a design guide, Intertape Polymer Group shows how an industrial brand built from acquisitions can keep the names it bought — Better Packages, Cantech, Clysar — under one short umbrella name. Compare Shurtape, a family-owned North Carolina tape maker, and 3M, another maker of packaging tapes. For this guide we use a carton kraft brown, a slate blue and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Intertape Polymer Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.