Thinking Big!

LTI is a small family-owned flexographic tag and label printer with a reputation for printing hard jobs

While many smaller printers tend to focus on one or two areas of specialization, Burlington, N.C.-based Labels Tags & Inserts Inc. (LTI, labelstagsandinserts.com) produces a wide range of products that one would expect to find coming out of shops several times its size. LTI prints consumer products: food and beverage, health and beauty, lottery, apparel, promotional direct mail, RFID, and security products, just to name a few. In fact, LTI doesn't think of itself as a small family-owned print shop. Instead, the company is managed like a big shop—constantly investing in new equipment to help it surpass its already high standard of quality, while reducing costs.

Leroy Baker, president and founder of LTI, put it this way, "If you want to stay in business today, you've got to get your quality up, because the benchmark for quality keeps getting higher and higher."

Baker has been in the printing business for 50 years. For 25 of them, he owned and operated a successful platemaking business. In the 1990s, he noted the rapid advancements being made in flexo technology and the resulting improvements in print quality. In 1995, he decided to move into flexographic printing, founding LTI as a small flexo shop with big ideas.

"Flexo quality kept getting better and better and we made it our job to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies so that we could offer our customers as good as, or better quality than any of the larger printers—and do it for less cost," he notes. "You just can't deliver the best quality for the lowest price if you don't invest in good equipment and keep after your production costs."

LTI operates four Mark Andy (www.markandy.com) flexographic printing presses, including both water-based and UV capability. "We have an in-house ink mixing machine for our water-based inks," reports Baker. "Pressure-sensitive used to be the biggest part of our make up, but in the past year we have produced an equal amount of various films. We don't print over 14 pt. tag stock."

Efficiency gains

The quest for a more efficient operation prompted LTI to install a Martin Automatic (www.martinautomatic.com) automatic splicer and automatic transfer rewind on its newest line, a Mark Andy XP5000 servo press. The benefits have been everything the company was looking for, and more.

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