Digital Domain September 2010

Rotolabel Creates Premium Packaging With Digital Press

PALO ALTO, Calif.—South African converter Rotolabel is using its HP Indigo press ws4500 to deliver high-quality print across a range of products for the local retail brand Woolworths of Cape Town.

"We purchased the HP Indigo press about four years ago, and Woolworths was just one of the food and wine retailers that were attracted to our new print capabilities," says Grant Watson, sales director, Rotolabel. "The increased quality of our digitally printed labels won us many new customers who required packaging for premium products, and our HP Indigo press continues to enhance our offering as a supplier of high-quality print services."

"We needed a trustworthy print service provider that would be able to take the concept for the new product labels from final artwork stage to the finished product," says Steve Andrews, packaging, design, and planning manager for Woolworths. "Having worked with Rotolabel before, we knew that they would be ideally suited for this job and having HP Indigo print capabilities made the decision to place the work with them even easier."

Maintaining consistent, high-quality printing

When Woolworths, which is a major retail brand in the Republic of South Africa, launched a range of cooking oils, dessert sauces, syrups, and glazes as part of a premium product line called "Cooks' Essentials," it immediately approached Rotolabel to produce the labels.

"Our company specializes in high-quality label printing and has a reputation for providing a dedicated, reliable service to its customers," says Watson. "To provide this high-end service, we have a number of letterpress machines and an HP Indigo press ws4500 at our disposal."

"Cooks' Essentials" is aimed at experienced cooks and cooking enthusiasts. The packaging design and finished quality of the product needed to attract this semi-professional market with a high-end look and feel.

"To achieve this premium look, one of the features of the new label design was a metallic effect at the bottom of all the labels," explains Andrews. "Critical to the appearance of the label and ultimately, the success of the new range, this effect needed to be fresh, clean, balanced, and bright. Rotolabel conducted numerous tests to ensure the required result was achieved."

"The challenge was to keep the metallic effect consistent across the range of different product labels," explains Nigel Deary, creative and prepress director for Woolworth's design and prepress agency, Calibre Brand Solutions. "We printed the first run on both the letterpress machines and the HP Indigo press ws4500. When we compared the results, the texture in the background differed from one level to the next on the labels printed on the letterpress, but with the digital press, we found we had much better control. It was also easier to use the HP Indigo press ws4500 within our workflow as it was really quick to set up and we were guaranteed the same high-quality every time we printed something."

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