Label Styles Get Fancier with New Shrink Sleeve Capabilities, Digital Customization, and Flashy Printing

Market Review: Label Technology by By Noel Jeffrey

Label Styles Get Fancier with New Shrink Sleeve Capabilities, Digital Customization, and Flashy Printing

If anything, the overwhelming design trend for labels is to make their silent shouts from store shelves even louder than ever in order to attract consumer attention. As a result, anyone who hasn’t shopped for the past couple of years would be amazed at how different products look due to the increasing use of shrink sleeves as well as high-style pressure sensitives, and even customized and regionalized labels. In aggregate, there’s been a change of scenery that continues to accelerate, especially in supermarkets.

“Shrink wrap is huge,” says Bert Hodapp, COO and owner of Chicago’s Kaleidoscope Imaging, a firm that creates packaging prototypes, comps, and production art. “It permits structural branding because you can show off the shape of the package. For example, WD 40 has developed a proprietary shaped can—and it’s also a way to fight counterfeit products.” (See “Wow! What A Package!”, Package Design, Jan/Feb 2004, p. 64.)

Hodapp notes that pressure sensitive labels are being used for structural branding as well—he calls it “the no label look.” Hodapp adds, “A clear pressure sensitive label shows off the package. The next step is making the pressure sensitive part of decorating. For example, a soft soap container with clear labeling can fit into a home’s décor.”

As for regionalized labeling, made possible by digital presses like the HP Indigos that can vary each individual image, Hodapp believes that while the cost of digital consumables is still too high for the industry to go “all digital,” he does see value in the process now. For example, he notes that in Toronto alone, Frito Lay offers a different chip package for each area of the city. Soft drink companies that offer to redeem cans at certain theme parks also require the customization made possible by digital. For example, if Six Flags is redeeming Coke cans, their image would be printed on the can while a similar offer might have Universal Studios or Knott’s Berry Farm—whatever the appropriate name happens to be.

Phil Angevine, owner of Logmatix, based in Marietta, Georgia, also sees the benefit of variable data digital printing. His company prints flexo product labels and coupons. Logmatix also offers thermal transfer printing including sequentially numbered preprinted bar codes and warehouse labels. He is about to acquire his first digital color printer, a desktop VIPColor Technologies label printer that will allow him to offer short-run color labels that are too costly to run on a flexo press, and allow him to vary label images easily. “We see that fitting into the service bureau part of our business,” Angevine says. “We will be able to achieve 600 dpi color without plates.”