Mercian Labels - business, open source & security label printing

When you visit the supermarket or liquor store you will see thousands of different product labels. But hone in on just one product and you will notice every label for that product is identical. Well of course it is, you are probably thinking, because the product is the same. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Take Jones Soda (http://www.jonessoda.com/), the American soft drink maker, for example. If you see Jones Soda on the shelf in a retail store you will see many different labels on the same product. Jones Soda has made custom labels a part of their brand. They encourage their customers to upload wacky photos and they use these photos on their bottles. They use digital label printing to print different photos on their labels so each six-pack will have a different looking label. Since this program launched back in 1996 they have received over one million customer photos for use on their bottles.

St. Francis Winery in California (http://www.stfrancisred.com/) has taken a slightly different approach but is still leveraging variable data label printing. Their “RED” wine comes with 12 different background designs on their wine labels, so when a customer orders a case of wine they will see a different label on every bottle. And on the shelf in the liquor store customers will also see the different labels.

With digital printing technology it is very easy to make every label different. But there are so few companies taking advantage of this. Yet. In the two examples above these companies have made their unique labels an integral part of their brand. Of course, it is important to keep some components of your label the same so you can have a somewhat consistent look but having a part of your product label be variable can really differentiate your product from the competition.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this point. Say you sell premium coffee sourced from Brazil. You could feature beautiful photos of Brazil on your coffee bag labels. Stock photography is so inexpensive these days you could buy photos on places like istockphoto.com for just a few dollars each. You could then position your coffee as the company that has the beautiful photos of Brazil and make this part of your promotion for the brand.

In a few years time this kind of branding will be common place. But there is a window of opportunity right now that allows companies to stand out from their competition by leveraging the power of variable data labels. It is becoming more difficult for companies to do something really different that can attract the attention of consumers. Take advantage of the digital printing technology in this window of opportunity and do something different with your product labels.

Peter Renton is the founder of Lightning Labels, an all-digital label printer based in Denver, Colorado. He writes regularly about the label industry on their company blog at http://blog.lightninglabels.com.

Yesterday Peter Renton from Lightning Labels in the USA has agreed to do a guest post here. One of the labelling industry’s most popular bloggers, Peter is well known for his excellent blog focussing on labelling issues and design.  Watch this space!

Yesterday I had an email from Ian Bates, Executive Vice President of Gerhardt USA who are a global player in label die cutting technology.  In the 1980’s Ian cut his teeth in the label printing world in our first label printing factory in the small village of Penkridge, Staffordshire.  He moved on from us over 20 years ago in 1988, and worked his way up the industry tree to his current position, as announced in labels and labelling last year.

Great to hear from you Ian, and congratulations on your latest career move.

Readers of this blog who are involved in the UK labels industry may be interested to know that there is a new UK based and focussed event being planned for UK label companies.  With the dominance of LabelExpo in Brussells every 2 years, there has not been a UK event of any significance for years.  Through the BSRLA I’ve been approached to support this event, which the BSRLA is doing. More details to follow, but I like to concept behind the event and I hope its a success.

If you wish to participate, then please let me know.

Today I’ve been at the Recycling and Waste Management show at the NEC in Birmingham on my continual quest to find a waste management solution for our stripping waste at Mercian Labels.  The disposal of this type of waste is the largest waste disposal problem we have as an industry (apart from silicon liner, which is already well addressed for volume users).

I went looking for 1 of 3 solutions:

1. recycling of our self adhesive paper and plastic waste
2. finding a waste carrier who will collect our waste and collect it for industrial incineration to fuel a cement works, or similar huge user of combustible fuels
3. find an onsite incineration solution that would safely allow us to us a “waste to energy” route to turn our waste stream into energy for heat, electric or similar.

I didnt get anywhere significant with any of the options.  Despite attending the biggest waste recycling show in the UK, there was very little interest in our industries problem.  The key conclusions from today:

• There is a no current solution for recycling self adhesive paper waste, but somebody is working on it. There is a limited volume solution for self adhesive plastic (PP and PE) waste by merging it with pure plastic extrusions
• If you want to send your waste to an industrial incinerator, then you need 5,000 tonnes per year, or else the cement companies and other are not interested. Small volumes users need not apply…  And they will charge you £60 per tonne for it (verses £55 a tonne to lanfill it!)
• EU regulations effectively prevent us using a purpose built safe onsite incinerator to turn our waste into heat energy or energy generation as the cost of the chimney scrubbing plant needed exceeds £250,000.

The best advice I got today was “ship your waste to China, as they have less strict environmental laws there and they can burn it for energy”. How can it be a good idea to ship your waste across the planet to a poorer country?

So, at a time of soaring energy prices, we just cannt recycle, reuse, incinerate or do anything with our waste stream but send it to landfill.  Landfill is not sustainable in the very long term, and in the current political climate in the medium term as well.

So, we are depressingly stuck between a rock and a hard place.  A solution has to be found to this problem, but at current landfill prices, I’m out of ideas.  It would be nice if our suppleirs took responsibility for the “waste” they leave us with, which would make it a more concentrated problem or a few major suppliers, rather than a large number of small users.  Somehow, I cannt see this happening.

Since early 2006 we at Mercian Labels have been conducting extended experiments on the effects of daylight on self adhesive labels printed using a variety of label printing methods, and we have regularly updated the results of these experiments on a dedicated webpage.

This can be a serious problem in our industry, as labels are often used for warnings and often exposed to daylight for extended periods.  The fact that UV energy in daylight causes fading in many printed media is well accepted, but beyond rumour and “conventional wisdom”, I’ve never actually seen any hard evidence that shows how different types of inks and printing techniques perform when faced with extended periods of exposure to daylight.

We have had experiments going since early 2006  and early 2008 on the following printing ink technologies:

• flexography - solvent based ink - dye based
• flexography - water based ink - pigmented
• letterpress - UV cured ink
• hotfoil - heat and pressure cured ink
• thermal transfer - wax resin based foil image
• Electrostatic toner based technology (v3) from Xeikon (Punch Graphix) from a Xeikon 330
• Digital offset technology from HP (Indigo) from a HP WS 4xxx press
• Electrostatic toner based technology from QuickLabel VIVO!
• UV cured inkjet imagery from Konica Minolta
• Electrostatic toner based technology from Degrava
• Inkjet images from Nilpeter using their Caslon technology with Xaar inkjet heads
• Inkjet images from Xaar using their own inkjet heads (unknown ink)

To give you an idea of what happens when labels fade badly, this is how much a label can fade if its made using inappropriate techniques for its end use application.

This image shows the difference between 2 halves of 4 different labels before and after 2.5 years of daylight exposure behind a south facing glass window.  The top 2 labels were printed with solvent based flexographic inks in a cream colour and a blue colour, and as you can see, the colour has faded to being almost no existent.  Areas with a clear lamination have given no protection to UV rays.

The middle red FRAGILE label was printed with water based flexo inks, and has noticeably faded but is still very clear.  The bottom barcode labels have hardly faded, although the lamination has yellowed.

Looking at a totally different technology, UV cured letterpress inks also fade quite noticeably, especially the lighter colours (yellow being particularly poor)

Best of all, hotfoil printed labels have shown almost no difference, apart from a colour change on the metallic blue foil on the middle gold label.

Looking at digital ink technology, our current test has been running for over 6 months, and there is hardly any changes in any of the many different ink technologies we have been trying.  See the detailed results here.

These (above) are from a Xeikon 330 digital label press.

and these (above) are from a HP Indigo digital label press

and (above) from a Vivo (above top), a Konica Minolta UV inkjet (above middle), and a Degrava (above right bottom “castelhino”)

And the final ones above are from the Xaar printhead used on a Nilpeter Caslon machine and from Xaar themselves.

Conclusions

I guess these observations and opinions will be of serious interest to those involved in specifying labels, and will probably destroy a few myths:

1. UV cured ink technology is not resistant to UV light!
2. solvent based inks have been a mainstay of the industry for decades, and whilst they are easy to use, they fade easily and have limited long term performance.  In line with our Corporate Social Responsibility policy, we at Mercian Labels do not routinely use solvent based inks on any of our labels any more.
3. cheap and simple thermal transfer labels are very resistant to UV, probably due to the high carbon content in the ribbon
4. All the established and emerging digital label printing technologies have a good resistance to UV (so far), but one will emerge as the winner, so watch this space!

I would positively welcome comments from customers, label users, suppliers, manufactuers or others in the industry on this subject - are the results of this experiment what you would expect?  Would anyone wish to predict which if the digital label technologies will do best?