Lightning Labels Blog

Notes from the DSCOOP Conference

Last week the DSCOOP conference was held in San Diego and it was the largest gathering of HP-Indigo digital press owners ever. Around 1200 people attended this year's conference an increase of over 60% from the 2007 conference.

Apart from the golf day, the highlights of the conference for me were:

1. Several ideas were presented around color consistency of the HP-Indigo presses. With the WS4500 press color consistency is already excellent but some tips were presented to make it even better.
2. There was a fascinating update on laser die-cutting from AB Graphic. Some of the research going on at that company should see laser cutting finally reach it's potential in the next year or so.
3. The introduction of "3D" color bar codes from HP was also fascinating. These are like 2D barcodes except with 256 colors. With a standard digital press you can encode up to 96 characters, easily enough for every product item on the shelf to have a unique code.
4. The HP senior management introduced Print 2.0, their vision for the future of print. This involves providing the tools so that more print jobs are printed on digital printers and presses as opposed to the traditional analog devices.
5. HP's commitment to being a leader in environmental stewardship. The HP-Indigo division is actually a leader within HP for eco-centric innovation (there will be more on this in a future post).

You can get a more complete rundown of the conference on the official DSCOOP Conference blog.

Corn Based Material No Longer Available

Last year we introduced the environmentally friendly EarthFirst PLA material made from corn. Well as of today we regret to inform you that this new material is no longer available. There have been numerous quality issues from the manufacturer and the print quality on our presses has become unacceptable. We know of many other label printers, both digital and traditional, who have experienced the same problems.

Here at Lightning Labels we are committed to providing you with environmentally friendly choices for your custom labels. We have already begun searching for a replacement material, but this will take some time. Rest assured, we will let you know as soon as we have found an alternative that meets our quality expectations.

LL President Scores a Hole in One

Right now Steve Smith and I are attending the HP DSCOOP (Digital Solutions COOPerative) conference in San Diego. As part of the conference there was a golf day at Torrey Pines (site of the 2008 US Open) yesterday. Steve, the president of Lightning Labels, scored his first hole in one on the difficult Par 3 11th hole. Above is a picture of Steve picking his ball up out of the cup.

The conference is a gathering of HP-Indigo digital printing users and features two days of educational sessions starting today. I will be reporting back next week on some of the conference highlights.

Real Men Can Now Burn Candles

Michael Chorazak was walking down the street one cold Portland (Oregon) day when he noticed the air was filled with the sweet scent of burning wood. As he passed a housewares store he wondered why candles were never scented with smells that men like. A light went on is his head and a new business was born.

Hotwicks is the name of his candle company, and it has a unique niche in the candle industry - candles aimed at men. He currently has eight different scented candles: beer (pictured above), campfire, coffee, grass, hippie, pigskin, stripper, and urinal cake. All the candles are in plain tin cans with two beautiful matching labels: a wrap around label and a lid label.

We print a lot of candle labels here at Lightning Labels but few with the striking wraparound labels that are part of a Hotwicks candle. All eight flavors have rich and vibrant colors leveraging the quality of our state of the art digital label presses. Here are some candle labels that really help the product stand out on the shelf in a retail store.

Obviously this is a fun and unique product and Michael has used the element of fun in his labels as well. Every wrap around label features a fun little saying about the candle. For example, the grass flavored candle says "all the pleasure of a freshly mowed lawn without any of the work." His web site also takes a light hearted approach to his candles.

Michael has done a lot of things right with his launch of Hotwicks Candles (he even has a blog). I will certainly be following his innovative new company with great interest.

The Dangers of PDF Proofing

Where would we be without the humble PDF format? Created by Adobe way back in 1993 the PDF (Portable Document Format) is the standard file format for viewing files online. Most design software can create a PDF and we use them here every day to send email proofs to customers.

However, it is certainly not a foolproof system. We had a customer call up today complaining that his PDF looked strange when he was viewing it on the screen - some of the type was appearing incorrectly as bold. We took a look at it on the screen ourselves and we could see the same problem. However, when we printed the PDF the text all looked fine.

This brings up one of the dangers of PDF proofing. The monitor where you view the PDF is always low resolution when compared with a laser or inkjet printer, so for very small type (which was the case in this job) a monitor can have some problems. If you want to be sure you receive what you are expecting then you should always request a hard copy proof. PDF's are only ever an approximation (for both type and color), which is why we offer free hard copy proofs for every job. With a hard copy proof you can be confident that there will be no surprises when you receive your custom labels.

We are Having a Product Photo Contest

The latest issue of our newsletter, The Lightning Flash, came out this week. In it we announced a new contest we are having here at Lightning Labels. It is a product photo contest, where you send us the photos of your products and the best photos will win prizes. All the details of the contest are here.

The photo above is an example of the kind of photo you can enter. This photo is from Natural Sundae, a new natural products company in Florida. They went to quite a bit of trouble for this beautiful photo, they bought some props and hired a friend who is a professional photographer. Now, you don't have to go to these lengths to enter our contest - a simple but attractive product photo will have just as much chance of winning.

Taking a good product photo is a very important part of promoting your products, and we want to find the very best product photos out there. So go ahead and send in photos of your products. The winners will be announced on this blog and in the next issue of the Lightning Flash.

10 Ideas to Improve Your Packaging

Last month, JoAnn Hines (known as the Packaging Diva) wrote an excellent article describing 10 ways to improve your packaging. Everyone involved in selling a product in a retail store should read this article. Sometimes we are so close to our own product it is difficult to take a step back and find ways to improve the labels and packaging. This article gives you many ideas to help you do just that.

My favorite idea she mentions is to visit a retail store and walk the aisles outside your product category looking for innovations that could be applied to your product. I am a big fan of adapting great ideas. There are so many great companies out there coming up with new and innovative packaging that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Check out the complete list and you are sure to come up with some ideas on how to improve your product packaging.

Wal-Mart's Sustainable Packaging Scorecard Begins

This week Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, began using its Sustainable Packaging Scorecard that was announced back in 2006. The scorecard rates suppliers on their progress towards developing sustainable packaging as well as their ability to help Wal-Mart reduce their environmental impact. The goal is a 5% reduction in packaging by 2013. That seemingly modest goal could help reduce carbon emissions by 700,000 metric tonnes according to Greenbiz.com.

More than 97,000 products from over 6,000 vendors are now part of the scorecard. The scorecard rates vendors packaging on several different metrics: greenhouse gas emissions, product-to-packaging ratios, space utilization, innovation, the amount of renewable energy used in packaging production, and emissions related to transportation. Wal-Mart is committed to working with vendors, trade associations and other organizations to ensure the scorecard remains equitable for all parties. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the coming months.

Consumers are becoming more aware of the impact that product packaging has on the environment. So the packaging industry is tackling this issue head on. Here at Lightning Labels we launched our corn-based material last year because we want to be at the forefront in sustainable packaging. There are many more initiatives we are working on this year in this area and we will share them with you here as we implement them.