Orgapack Brand Guidelines: The Dietikon Strapping-Tool Maker Inside Signode

Strapping hand tools and machines from Dietikon.

Orgapack is a Swiss maker of strapping tools and strapping machines based in Dietikon, near Zurich. On its website the company describes itself as a maker of “strapping hand tools, machines and systems for final packaging and transport security,” and it dates its own story to 1925 with the line “Tradition and progress since 1925.” The same page calls Orgapack one of the world’s leading manufacturers in final packaging and the securing of goods for transport; that is the company’s own description.

What Orgapack makes is narrow and specific. Strapping is the band of plastic or steel that is pulled tight around a carton, a bundle or a loaded pallet and then sealed, so that the load travels as one unit. At its Dietikon headquarters, the company says, it develops hand tools, standard machines and complete installations for strapping with plastic and steel strap, together with their control systems, and it names its own manufacturing technology and assembly as part of its core competence. Its tools do the two jobs that matter in that process: tensioning the strap and sealing it.

The brand no longer stands alone. Orgapack’s legal notice says its website is maintained by Signode Industrial Group, Packaging Systems Europe, care of Signode Switzerland GmbH in Dietikon, and that the trademarks on the site belong to Orgapack and to Signode Industrial Group LLC. The chain behind that runs through two sales. Packaging Gateway reported on 9 February 2014 that the investment firm Carlyle had signed an agreement with the US manufacturer Illinois Tool Works (ITW) to buy its industrial packaging group, which made strap, stretch and protective packaging consumables, tools and equipment. Signode says it was restructured that year as Signode Industrial Group and later became the transit-packaging division of Crown Holdings, a change its own site dates to 2018 in one place and to 2017 in another; it launched Signode as one global master brand in 2019.

The OR-T and the interpack stand.

The clearest dated view of the modern brand comes from interpack 2017, the packaging trade fair. Packaging Europe reported on 10 May 2017 that Signode Industrial Group would show its brands together on one stand, among them Signode, Orgapack, Strapex, Haloila and Lachenmeier, under a new tagline, “Local partners | Global solutions.” The same report said that “Orgapack Packaging Technology” was presenting a new generation of battery-operated manual strapping tools, the OR-T, built around what it called the five most important customer needs, among them robustness, ergonomics and reliability, with digital monitoring of the strapping process.

The OR-T name now heads the range. Orgapack’s current site lists battery-powered tools for plastic strap numbered from the OR-T 55 to the OR-T 670, and battery-powered tools for steel strap such as the OR-T R19 and R32. The company says the battery tools have full-colour displays and use a battery system it names as AMPShare, and it describes the OR-T series as “Swiss made” and as DEKRA-tested and certified. For steel, it says, the tools can strap with seals, in double or single notch, or without a seal, and are meant for mobile use in rough settings.

Beside the battery tools sit pneumatic and manual models. The site sorts the whole range by the kind of strap, plastic or steel; by the job, as tensioners, sealers or combination tools that do both; and by how the two ends of the strap are joined: by friction weld, with a seal, sealless, or with a push-type joint. That plain sorting, by strap, power source and joint, is how the company itself presents its catalogue.

Orgapack also offers automatic and semi-automatic strapping machines. The automatic machines, the company says, handle feeding, tensioning, sealing and cutting in one pass, and can stand alone or be built into a packaging line with conveyors, wrapping machines and palletisers; they take polypropylene or polyester strap and carry an operator touch panel. The semi-automatic models are aimed at small and medium volumes. A download centre on the site carries datasheets, manuals and brochures, with a language selector that runs to twenty languages, from Bulgarian and Chinese to Swedish and Turkish.

How 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 product brand under a master name.

Orgapack today sits inside a group that has chosen to lead with one name. In an interview published in 2024 by the German business publication Wirtschaftsforum, Signode’s vice-president for global marketing and communications, speaking for Signode Switzerland GmbH in Dietikon, said the group’s acquired companies had long worked largely apart from one another, until it decided five years earlier to appear in the market only under the Signode name and to gather the individual product brands beneath it. He said the group handles production and sales of its whole range in-house and also offers repair and maintenance.

Within that structure Orgapack keeps a name of its own. It still runs its own website at orgapack.com, with Dietikon contact details and the OR-T model names, and its legal notice lists Orgapack trademarks beside those of Signode Industrial Group. Signode, for its part, dates its own brand to 1916 and says it has its global headquarters in Tampa, Florida, since 2022.

On its own site Orgapack groups the OR-T series under three headings, advanced ergonomics, reliable quality and high performance, and lists features under each, such as a balanced design, an optical guide for inserting the strap correctly and fine adjustment of tension force, tension speed and welding; those are the company’s descriptions. Its short lines are just as plain: “Tradition and progress since 1925” for the company, and “Swiss made” for the tools.

For a design guide, Orgapack shows how an old Swiss tool name can carry on as a product brand inside a much larger group, keeping its own model names while the ownership above it changes. Compare Signode, the group it now belongs to, and Strapex, which stood beside it on Signode’s interpack stand in 2017. For this guide we use a steel blue, a graphite and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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