Our Why
From our beginning in 2016 with a single plant in Madison, Wisconsin, ePac was created with a mission to provide locally-based consumer packaged goods companies with the ability to grow with great packaging, and be accretive to the communities we serve. Today, ePac serves thousands of brands of all sizes across the globe, enabling greater flexibility, sustainability, and faster time to market.
ePac Core Values:
Provide exceptional customer service
Help our customers grow
Support the communities and local businesses we serve
Develop sustainable solutions for our environment
Leadership Team
ePac’s leadership team is mix of highly successful industry veterans with complementary skill sets.
Jack Knott, Chief Executive Officer
Jack Knott is an experienced CEO and Operating Partner with a record of success across a broad range of complex assignments involving business growth, restructuring, acquisitions, mergers, integrations and turnarounds in highly competitive marketplaces, both domestically and internationally. He has helped create over $1.5 billion of equity improvement in four assignments, producing $254MM, $315MM, $480MM, and $250MM respectively in realized shareholder value and $400M in unrealized shareholder value.
Jack is an effective strategist, consolidator and creator of optimal revenue streams which have resulted in profitable market entities with sustained customer satisfaction and loyalty. He is respected by bondholders, shareholders and Boards for business acumen and integrity, and has led a wide variety of successful business activities and financial restructurings, including mergers & acquisitions, joint ventures, leveraged buy-outs, hostile takeovers, IPOs, start-ups and bankruptcies.
Jack’s last position was Chairman and CEO of Coveris, which was the merger of five of Sun Capital’s packaging portfolio companies, creating the sixth largest global plastic packaging company with $2.9B of revenue.
Jack retired from Coveris in 2016 and started ePac with Carl Joachim and Virag Patel. Jack has a BS in Chemical Engineering and an MBA, both from the University of Wisconsin. In the past he served as Chairman of the Flexible Packaging Association, and was a board member for six years. He has been awarded eleven different patents for various production processes and components.
Carl Joachim, Chief Marketing Officer
Carl Joachim has over 30 years of executive marketing experience with Xerox, Ocè, and Ricoh, developing markets for breakthrough production digital printing technologies. Prior to beginning his career in tech marketing with Xerox, Carl led a team to implement the world’s first production digital printer, the Xerox 9700, while with Crum and Forster Insurance Co.
In 2013 he turned his focus to the packaging industry where he studied the impact digital printing could one day have on the industry. He soon began working with Jack Knott and Virag Patel, and in 2016 the trio formed ePac as the first all-digital flexible packaging company in North America.
Carl holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Saint Michal’s College in Winooski, Vermont. He is a longtime advisory board member of the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) Graphic Communication Dept, with the school playing an important role in the formative years of ePac.
Virag Patel, Chief Operating Officer
As a senior executive with over 17 years of manufacturing experience in the automotive and packaging industries, Virag Patel helped create over $800 million of equity improvement in two assignments, producing $154m, and $360m, respectively, in realized shareholder value and $300m in unrealized shareholder value.
He additionally developed the first truly global supply chain ($350m of Raw Material) in the converter market and built a $40m business by utilizing strategic manufacturing disciplines to lower cost and increase efficiencies.
Virag has led a broad range of successful business activities and restructurings, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and start-ups. He has a proven record of managing corporations with various capital structures, and exceptional talent in dealing in complex mergers and integrations.
Most recently, Virag was Managing Partner/Co-Founder of Arion Partners. A buy side advisory firm that focuses on acquisitions for a global family investor base from the petrochemical industry. Virag has a BS in Finance from Clemson University and an MBA in Global Management from Thunderbird Business School.
Parag Patel, President of Global Services
Parag Patel is a problem-solver who has spent his career leveraging technology to create industry changing solutions. By focusing on the customer experience and customers’ challenges, he developed innovative solutions in diverse marketplaces from groceries, to clothing, to automotive accessories consistently leading to significant increases in sales. His philosophy has been to make engineering a business partner by understanding all aspects of the business including finance, sales, service, production, marketing, and merchandising so that he can optimally drive the technology solutions (don’t call him the “IT guy”!) Prior to joining ePac in 2018, Parag spent 14 years as CIO/CTO of AutoAnything which became an AutoZone company in late 2012. Before AutoAnything, Parag worked at several internet startups after starting his career at PRC (MLS) and AT&T. Parag holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Clemson University and happens to be fluent in German.
