Lightning Labels Blog

Paper Battery Unveiled

I discovered this amazing news during my Holiday reading. A Korean company has invented a completely new battery technology that does not include any toxic chemicals and is paper thin. There is no talk of when this material will be commercially available, my guess is it will be several years, but if and when it happens the ramifications could be huge. You can read more about it here.

My guess is that if this technology becomes mainstream label material companies will work out ways to print on it and we could have a product label that is a power source. This opens up all kinds of applications. If you combine this product with electronic paper that I have written about before and suddenly the label is transformed and videos on product labels could become a reality.

My guess is we are years and probably decades away from commercial use, but you know when it happens Lightning Labels will be at the forefront.

Happy New Year everyone. Here's to a happy and prosperous 2007.

Snowed Under in Denver

We have been literally snowed under here this week. It started early Wednesday morning and the flakes didn't let up until Thursday afternoon. We closed Lightning Labels down at 2pm on Wednesday - we probably should have closed sooner because several employees had horror drives home. One of our press operators took 5 hours to get home on what was normally a 45 minute drive.

We didn't even attempt to open on Thursday, no one would have been able to get to work anyway. Even today several employees couldn't get out of their driveways. UPS and FedEx have been suffering as well. There was no pickup or delivery from any of the freight companies on Wednesday or Thursday, so everyone trying to get packages out of Denver just had to wait. We did the best we could, I drove our Wednesday shipment to the local UPS store in the hope that maybe they would have a pickup on Thursday.

Now, we are just doing our best to get caught up with our backlog. I ask everyone to be patient, we are going to be working hard to get your custom label orders out as soon as we can. We have a dedicated staff who will be putting in extra effort over the coming days.

There was one benefit from all this - everyone in the Denver area is going to enjoy a white Christmas. To all Lightning Labels customers and readers of this blog I would like to wish you a safe and happy Holiday Season.

New Digital Label Press On Order

I am delighted to announce today that Lightning Labels has signed a contract on a brand new, state of the art digital label press from HP. The HP Indigo WS4500 was released three months ago at LabelExpo in Chicago and is the new standard in digital label printing.

This new press brings with it many advantages:

1. Higher quality color - the output from the WS4500 is simply the best quality available in the world today.
2. Ability to do longer runs - for 1 and 2 color jobs the new press prints at over 100 feet a minute, and in normal four color mode it prints at 50 feet a minute. This compares with our current 24 feet a minute for all jobs.
3. Faster turnaround - the setup for the WS4500 is even faster, so this will mean an ability to print more jobs in a day. And with the faster press speed we should be able to bring our customers even faster turnaround.
4. Spot Colors - the WS4500 will give us the ability to do spot colors, which we don't have with our current 5 color machines.
5. Less Down Time - the WS4500 is the fourth generation of digital label presses from HP-Indigo. It is engineered to maximize uptime; many standard operator maintained processes are done automatically in the WS4500.

We are excited about the purchase of this new press. It will allow us to serve our growing customer base even better. And it will help Lightning Labels stay at the forefront of digital label printing. It is scheduled to be delivered the middle of January so we hope to be in full production mode on the new press by the end of February. I will let you know when we are ready.

Holiday Gift Custom Labels

The Lightning Labels blog has been taking some time off. My wife gave birth to our first child, a baby boy we named Jude on Thanksgiving Day, so as you can imagine my attention has been elsewhere. But I am slowly getting back in the swing of things and the blog posts will become more frequent from now on.

In a previous post I introduced you to the custom label program at Johnnie Walker. Today I wanted to introduce you to another web site where you can order personalized labels for retail products. Pernod Ricard is the huge French wine and spirit distributor, and they have a special web site where you can order your own custom labels for their products - perfect for the Holiday Season.

You can select a custom label for a variety of different brands - Wild Turkey bourbon, Chivas Regal scotch whiskey, Jacob's Creek wine to name a few. You can enter your own message, up to 30 characters on two or three lines and for businesses you can even add your own black and white logo. Best of all, just like the Johnnie Walker program the labels are free. The idea is for you to buy their product at the liquor store and then stick your own personalized label over the top of the product label that is already there.

Pernod Ricard has focused more on the corporate market here with their gift label program. With the ability to add your own logo, if you are out of ideas for a corporate gift this Holiday Season this could be worth a try.