Gaasch Packaging & Trusted Family

Learn how Trusted Family’s platform helped Gaasch Packaging rebuild the Affectio Societatis within all the branches of the family.

Could you please introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Jean-Christophe Gaasch. I work for Gaasch Packaging, a company that distributes primary packaging. We serve various sectors, including the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Our business involves buying and selling packaging, mainly glass bottles. We are based in Belgium, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom, and our company currently employs nearly sixty people.

What challenges were you primarily facing before discovering Trusted Family, and how did our platform help you address them?

Our family business, founded by my great-grandfather, brings together three families and three companies spanning four generations, with the fifth generation already on the way. Over time, we noticed a certain distance developing among non-active shareholders who were gradually losing their connection with the different companies. My cousins and I sought solutions to recreate the affectio societatis—that sense of belonging to the business. Trusted Family became an integral part of this process, serving as a communication platform between the families. We named our platform “Polaris” in reference to the North Star, which guides our family group. Thanks to the platform and Trusted Family’s guidance, we have been able to structure various aspects related to the family business, such as next-generation training, mentoring, and organizing family meetings.

You recently migrated to T.F. 2.0, what convinced you to make the switch and what has been your experience so far?

We decided to migrate to T.F. 2.0 primarily for technical reasons (modernity of the platform, new features…) and the idea of being among the first to use this new version was appealing to us. The changes and improvements were well-presented, and we’d like to thank Trusted Family for the support provided during this migration. Trusted Family took the time to explain the new platform in detail and helped us get comfortable with it from day one. While we still need to get used to some of the new features (we occasionally still search for something that is now in a different location than we’re used to), the overall experience has been very positive. This new platform is more comprehensive and offers us numerous possibilities for the future.

Any advice for freshly onboarded families?

When migrating from the old platform to the new one, good customer support is essential. Trusted Family understood this well and provided us with invaluable assistance, which greatly facilitated our transition. I strongly recommend that all users of the platform participate in the support sessions, as integration could otherwise be more challenging. As for the migration itself, it went smoothly. The comprehensive migration tool developed by Trusted Family allowed us to retain all the data stored on the previous version.

If you had to summarize your experience with us in one sentence, what would it be?

For our family group, Trusted Family is truly a tool of cohesion that has allowed us to create or recreate affectio societatis, especially among the 4th and 5th generations, with increasingly distant shareholders. Thanks to Trusted Family, we have been able to bring together family members both virtually and physically who otherwise might never have known each other.