Since all of the custom labels are the same size, they can be printed in the same run.
As you’ll have noticed on supermarket shelves in recent years, it seems there are a plethora of different variations of the same product, even within the same brand. Every product these days seems to be available in multiple flavors or scents – or even varying ingredient combinations aimed at different market segments. In the label industry we call this “versioning”, and digital label printing makes it readily available to even the smallest businesses.
Fundamentally, if you wanted to print 10 different versions of the same basic product label, traditional label printing services would require different plates for each change, which can add significant expense (and setup time). Each version may also need to be printed separately, particularly if the colors change. In custom digital label printing, all we need to do is group together the individual artwork files for each version and we can print them all simultaneously. The colors and designs can even be completely different between versions – so long as they’re all the same size and shape and being printed on the same material.
Imagine the flexibility this provides when designing your packaging. Your various versions can have completely different visual designs aimed at making the products more visually enticing – for example the strawberry and peach flavors could include beautiful color photographs of the respective fruits to draw the consumer’s eye and more effectively describe the contents of their containers. Similarly, the use of different colored designs could differentiate between versions – green (or perhaps red) for an apple-scented body wash, orange for an orange-scented version, and so on. Rather than be restricted to simple text-only changes for each variation, digital printing provides unlimited flexibility of color and design. Instead of worrying about “How many colors do you want?” you can focus on making maximum impact with as many colors as you like – and you can gang all the different versions together to achieve the best pricing.
Different quantities for versions within an order are no problem.
Here’s an example of a multi-version digital product label order. If your order is for a total of 2,000 custom labels spread across 4 different versions, you might want 1,000 of one version, 500 of the second version and 250 each for the remaining two versions (or some other logical breakdown to suit your business needs). We can usually be quite flexible in this way, but there are some practical implications if the quantities are completely randomized with no logical groupings. For example, asking for one version of 275 labels, another of 245 and another of 230 would make the production process more complicated, and may involve significant waste as well – which is something we try to avoid if possible to minimize our environmental impact. If your ordered quantities look unusually challenging in this way, we may need to work with you to achieve a less wasteful breakdown.
So there you have it. As long as your custom product labels are all the same size and shape (and on the same material), there’s no need to worry about extra cost or placing multiple orders. Digital label printing means we can print them all at the same time and save you significant money in the process.