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.
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.
Here at Lightning Labels we certainly don't deal with famous people very often. But a couple of weeks ago we received a phone call from the assistant of Lee Iacocca, one of this country's leading business legends of the past 50 years. Mr. Iacocca was in need of some bookplate labels for his recently published book, Where Have All The Leaders Gone?
Now, I must confess I didn't even know what a bookplate label was (here is Wikipedia's definition), but I have since learned that it is a label that is typically affixed on the inside front cover of a book. Historically, it was used to identify the owner of the book, but today authors use these labels to provide autographed copies of books. Rather than signing books on location, the author signs these bookplate labels and the labels are sent to be attached to the books. It is more convenient, and frankly, I think it is more elegant and professional.
One important point to remember when ordering bookplate labels. The labels must have an imprintable surface. So these labels for Mr. Iacocca were done with our matte laminate. It not only provides a more elegant look, it readily accepts a ballpoint pen or marker.
We are delighted to announce that once again, Lightning Labels has been honored as one of the fastest growing private companies in our region. The Denver Business Journal compiles this list every year, and this year was our best ever result on the list. In our revenue category (small-medium businesses with annual revenues between $3 million and $7 million) we came in 7th.
To qualify for the list, the Denver Business Journal compared revenue growth from 2005 to 2007 and Lightning Labels came in at an even 150% growth during that time period. Thanks must go to all of you, our customers, for helping to make this growth possible.
I have been a big fan of MarketingSherpa for many years now. They are specialists in tracking what actually works in all aspects of marketing and they produce interesting articles and case studies on a regular basis. So, when a couple of months ago they asked me to do an interview on label design I jumped at the chance.
The title of the article is Label Design Primer: 13 Tips to Help Your Product Get Noticed on Store Shelves, and you can read the full article here. But you need to be quick, it is only available to everyone for the next week (until July 8th). After that you will have to register at MarketingSherpa before you can read the entire article.
Regular readers of this blog and our newsletter will recognize some of the points here. Basically, I talked about what you need to do to get your label to stand out from the crowd. While there are no hard and fast rules that guarantee your labels will get noticed, by following these tips you will be doing a better job than most of your competition.
I was catching up on my blog reading over this past weekend and came across another interesting post from Seth Godin from a couple of weeks ago. This one was about serial numbers. Here at Lightning Labels we print a lot of serial number labels, and in most cases you can see that little thought has gone in to the creation of these serial numbers. Godin provides a list of several things to consider when creating serial numbers.
The keys points I believe are these:
If someone is calling a technical support line and they have to read a serial number there is already most likely some level of frustration. If you can make the serial number very easy to read then at least that won't make the situation worse. It is simple to do, costs almost nothing and can only help your business.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when it comes to business, imitation can be a huge problem. Last month Inc.com featured an article on counterfeiting and the impact on the US economy. Product piracy has affected many industries such as software, airplane parts, fashion, music and pharmaceutical drugs to the tune of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year. Some individual companies have had to lay off workers because of the lost business due to counterfeiting.
So how does a company fight back? The best place to start is with your own packaging. For years companies have used holographic labels on their products but with today's digital printing technology there is a much better way. HP in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry have developed a system that can put a unique identifying color barcode on every product item - they call this "item level serialization" where every item in batch has a unique barcode. These color barcodes can contain large amounts of information that are virtually impossible to duplicate. In a 1" square you can encode 700 characters worth of information, which is roughly the length of this paragraph. The beauty about this system is that with a scan of the label you can know exactly what day the product was bottled, where it was bottled and how it was distributed. This can also help with product recalls.
So that is the sophisticated way to fight counterfeiters and implementing this system will be effective but also cost upwards of $100,000. Now, most businesses don't have that much money to address counterfeiting. There is a much simpler approach that just involves using Excel, a simple barcode and leveraging the power of digital label printing.
Here is an example of how this can work. Say you have product run of 5,000 and so you want to order 5,000 product labels. Use the RAND() function in Excel to create 5,000 random numbers. You can multiply this random number by, say, 1,000,000,000, so you can create a list of 5,000 random numbers between 1 and 999,999,999. You can then encode these random numbers with a simple barcode such as Code 128. Then allocate a small space on your label for this barcode, making sure you separate it from your UPC code (you can read more about barcodes here). With digital label printing we can print a different barcode, encoding your random number, on every one of your 5,000 labels. Now, if you see your products in a retail store and you suspect they might be counterfeit you can simply scan some of the barcodes and compare the numbers to the random numbers on your spreadsheet. The numbers should all be different and should all match numbers on your spreadsheet. If not, then you have a counterfeit product.
If all this sounds too complicated then don't worry, here at Lightning Labels we will be happy to do the hard work for you.
We received over 300 entries for our Product Photo Contest that ended earlier this month. It took quite a while to go through all the entries. After much deliberation we are pleased to announce that the photo above from Bella Lucce has been selected as the overall winner. It is a beautiful photo and a deserving winner. You can view all the winning photos here. And thanks to everyone who entered the contest.
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.
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.
