Lightning Labels Blog

Product Labels: Still the Best Technology

I was brushing my teeth this morning and looking at all the products on our bathroom countertop. My wife had been cleaning out our cabinets so everything was on the counter. I was struck by how many product labels I could see. When I counted them all there were 56 different products with product labels - above is a photo of about half of them.

Now, not every product has a physical label on it - several products such as toothpaste are screen printed with all the product details printed directly on to the container. But the vast majority of products use physical labels adhered to bottles. Even major consumer products like Listerine that probably print millions of labels at a time have decided that a paper label is the best way to identify their product.

Despite all the technological advances of the last few years, the best way to identify and market your product at the point of sale is with a colorful product label. And with today's high quality digital label printing, that is perfect for short runs, tiny companies can compete with the likes of Johnson & Johnson. You might not have the marketing clout of the big companies but your product can have a label that is every bit as good. 

The World's Biggest Label Printing Show

LabelExpo is the largest trade show for the label printing industry. Every September it alternates between Chicago and Brussels, this year was the European edition (which is far bigger than the US version) that ended a couple of days ago. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it over to the show but I followed updates from Label & Narrow Web magazine, Converting Magazine and live on Twitter.

Fellow label industry blogger, Adrian Steele of Mercian Labels in the UK, has an excellent roundup of the show posted on his blog today. It sounds like it was a good show with several new developments in digital label printing but nothing that looks like it would threaten the dominance of the HP-Indigo technology. Although to be fair, as Adrian points out on his blog, the Xeikon 3300 that was released last year is an excellent competitor to the HP. None of the new would be competitors that launched at LabelExpo can match the quality of either machine.

Natureflex Material Withdrawn

We screwed up. Earlier this year, with great fanfare, we launched the Natureflex material as a more sustainable and environmentally friendly label material. At the same time we announced that we were phasing out the corn-based EarthFirst PLA material.

Unfortunately a number of quality issues have surfaced with Natureflex, and we have decided that the best course of action is to withdraw it from our list of available materials. At the same time we have reinstated EarthFirst PLA as our environmentally friendly alternative.

We have notified the manufacturers of Natureflex about the problems and we hope they will get resolved soon. But in the meantime we want to offer some kind of green material. While EarthFirst PLA certainly isn’t the perfect environmentally friendly solution, it is currently the most reliable material available. So you can now order EarthFirst PLA again. We do have some stock of Natureflex still, but we will not be reordering it when our current inventory is exhausted.

We are truly sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you. While we are committed to providing environmentally friendly label alternatives, we are also committed to maintaining the highest quality standards. When and if the manufacturers of Natureflex can resolve their quality issues, we will be happy to consider it once again.

The Cost of Printing Labels Yourself

Many Lightning Labels customers started out printing labels on their home ink-jet printer. This is a great place to start because it is relatively inexpensive and you can print very small quantities of labels as you need them. Of course, you want your labels to look great so you print them in photo quality mode. Then you start to notice how quickly you are going through ink.

Ink for home ink-jet printers is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. For colored ink you can pay around $20 for a cartridge containing just 11ml of ink. That equates to around $7,000 for a gallon of ink. Certainly makes gasoline prices look cheap. But a more important question is how many labels can you print from a cartridge of ink? The answer is, of course, it depends. It depends on the size of your labels and how much ink coverage is needed.

You can get some idea by looking at the cost to print 4x6 photos. A couple of old studies pegged ink costs somewhere around 20c a label to produce a 4x6 photo. I don't think ink has gone down that much in recent years so that is probably still accurate. The costs vary widely from brand of printer and where you buy your ink. Then you need to take into consideration wear and tear on the printer and the cost of your time while printing the labels (and removing the inevitable paper jams). And you will need to factor in the cost of blank labels.

Printing labels yourself is an excellent way to get started if you need product labels. What we have found is that as time goes on, it is not just the cost but also the hassle of printing labels in-house that drives people to look for a professional label printer. Best of all, as your volume increases you may be surprised to find that it is actually less expensive to outsource this very important part of your business.

Photo courtesy of justinbaeder.

A Law Blog About Beverage Labels

I stumbled across this interesting blog yesterday. Bevlog is the blog of Lehrman Beverage Law, a law firm specializing in beverage law, specifically alcoholic beverages. According to their web site, there are more than 100,000 applications for wine, beer and spirits labels approved by the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) every year and the people at Lehrman Beverage law review almost all of them. The most interesting labels make it on to the blog.

It is necessary for every alcoholic beverage maker to obtain a certificate of label approval (COLA) before they can sell their products. This is all public record - you can search the database here. Somehow this law firm obtains pictures of the labels and includes the most noteworthy ones on their blog together with some commentary about the label or the product. For anyone interested in wine, beer of spirits labels you really should check it out.

LL Installs State of the Art Prepress System

We have had engineers from HP-Indigo here the last couple of weeks installing our new prepress system from HP & EskoArtwork. The HP-Indigo Label and Packaging Server has been designed from the ground up to work with the HP-Indigo label presses and it is sweet.

It comes with a high performance RIP to prepare graphic files for the press, it provides strong color management capabilities, integrated Adobe Illustrator plug-ins, and makes variable data jobs much simpler. The bottom line is that it will allow us to produce labels more quickly and with even higher quality than before.

We are creating production jobs on this new system every day now and we intend to phase over all jobs from our old system over the coming weeks. 

Five Ways to Save Money When Buying Labels

These are not the best of times. With some $2 trillion of stock market wealth wiped out in recent weeks and with most economic pundits saying it is not a case of if but when a recession will happen, many of us turn our thoughts to how best to save money. If you have products to sell you need to buy labels, so below are five ways you can save money when buying custom labels.

1. Choose the smallest sized label

The smallest sized label uses less material and less ink so is always going to be less expensive. However, to get the most bang for your buck you need to understand how label printing presses work. Here at Lightning Labels we use 12" wide label material on our HP-Indigo WS4500 label presses. So if you have a 4" x 5" label, you might consider going to a 3.5" x 5" label, because a 3.5" x 5" label will fit better on our press (3 across versus 2 across for the 4" x 5") and the savings will be substantial for choosing a label just 0.5" smaller. I invite you to play around with our Instant Online Label Quoter and choose various different sizes to find out the best value size you can work with.

2. Gang all label orders on same size

If you can gang all your label orders on the same size with the same material, your order is treated as one job. This point, above all else, will save you the most money. For example, you may need labels for a 4oz container and an 8oz container, the obvious thing to do here is to have two different label sizes. But if you can make do with one common label size you will save yourself possibly hundreds of dollars in label printing charges. Of course, in some circumstances it may not be possible, but the fewer label sizes you use the more money you will save.

3. Order on the least expensive material

Our standard material is white BOPP - it is also our least expensive material. This combined with the high gloss laminate will provide you with the least expensive option for your labels. Even though this is the least expensive option you are not compromising on quality in any way. Your custom labels will look fantastic, be waterproof and oilproof, and be highly resistant to normal wear and tear.

4. Make sure your label is correct

One sure fire way to waste money when ordering labels is to make a mistake and then have to reorder the very same labels. We encourage every customer to check your artwork thoroughly before placing an order so errors can be corrected before they even get to us. As a further backup, we are happy to provide press proofs free of charge to you so you can see exactly what your labels will look like when printed. Always check your proof very carefully for any errors and make sure you are happy with the result before giving us the go ahead.

5. Don't be in a hurry

Here at Lightning Labels we treat every job as a rush job, so there are no additional fees for rush charges. However, unless you are local here in the Denver area, you will have to get your labels shipped. The difference in ground rates and overnight rates for UPS is substantial, so you will always save money if you are not in a hurry so your labels can be shipped ground.

Digital and Green Printing at LabelExpo

I spent most of this week in Chicago at the biannual LabelExpo trade show with my cohort Steve Smith and our production manager, Bruce Niccum. It is the largest gathering on the planet for people in the label printing industry. This was my fourth show and by far the most interesting. There were two main themes at this year’s show: sustainable label printing and digital. There were special areas in the exhibition hall set aside for both topics and plenty of seminars as well.

It is great to see label printers finally getting the green message. The CEO of the largest company in our industry said in a news conference that sustainable label printing practices were going to be a focus for his company going forward. As long time environmental champion, Calvin Frost, said in his presentation, this simply would not have happened even two years ago.

So what does all this mean for Lightning Labels customers? Well for a start, there were a large number of new environmentally friendly label materials on display at the show. There was label paper made from 100% recycled paper, many options for paper manufactured from sustainable forests, bioplastic material made from wood chips, and even material made from banana leaves and grass in the Philippines.

We will be testing these materials in coming weeks and we will announce on this blog when we make some new choices available. There was also a lot of discussion about recycling, environmentally benign adhesives, and ways to reduce waste. In the near future I will be doing a number of features on this blog on sustainability in label printing, as I digest everything I have learned this week.

The other feature of LabelExpo this year was digital label printing. In March HP announced the release of their new label press, the WS6000, and LabelExpo was the first time it was on public display in this country. It won’t be available for many months, but it is a truly amazing machine. It is twice the speed of the current WS4500 (we have two of these) and there have been many improvements in the internal operation of the press to reduce downtime and increase operator efficiency. When printing a one or two color job, the WS6000 prints at around 200 feet a minute which matches the speed of many conventional presses, and there is very little setup with a digital press compared with an hour or more of setup for a conventional press. As I watched this digital label press print at that speed, I thought it was a thing of beauty. I certainly wouldn’t like to be selling conventional label presses these days.

When I started Lightning Labels back in 2002 there were only two options for anyone interested in buying a digital label press. At LabelExpo this year I counted more than a dozen. Many new companies have entered this arena and there has been some great innovation. Our first press that we purchased in January 2002 cost $300,000, weighed well over 1,000 pounds and ran at around 25 feet a minute. This year there was a desktop press from Primera that costs $15,000 and runs at the same speed. Now the quality is not quite as good as our original press, but it is still an impressive machine.

Speaking of quality, I was pleased to notice that despite all this innovation, the print quality leader is still HP-Indigo. Not one of the new digital label presses on display could match the quality of our current HP-Indigo WS4500 presses (other than HP’s own WS6000). There is far more competition for HP these days, which is healthy for everyone, but I left the show feeling that the technology we have today is still the best available.

Article on Variable Data Label Printing

The current issue of Package Design Magazine has an article I wrote on variable data label printing. I provide some examples of companies that are effectively using this technology today as well as five ideas that anyone can adopt to leverage the power of variable data label printing.

New Finishing Equipment Arrives Today

I have written before about our wonderful state of the art digital label printing presses we use here at Lightning Labels. We are very proud of the quality that our HP-Indigo presses are able to produce. But the printing presses are only half of the equation. Once the labels are printed they need to be diecut and slit on to individual rolls. The equipment to do these jobs is called finishing equipment.

Today we took delivery of our new Omega Digicon 2 die cutting machine from AB Graphics. It is the current state of the art as far as finishing equipment is concerned and we are excited to get it installed. At the same time we have purchased four additional pieces of equipment to help improve the efficiency of our operation here. But what does this all mean to you as a Lightning Labels customer?

For a start, once all this equipment is up and running it means we will be able to move jobs through our plant more quickly, which will reduce the turnaround time for everyone. We will also be able to expand our capabilities - with a couple of new options for you. Stay tuned here, we will make an announcement about this when we are ready for production.

Here at Lightning Labels we always like to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Now we will have state of the art printing combined with state of the art die cutting. This will allow us to provide even better service to our customers than ever before.