At Hine Labels, we take pride in our long-standing reputation for providing high-quality self-adhesive labels, tickets, and non-adhesive tags. Our clients have trusted us for almost 50 years, and we’re always looking for ways to enhance our service and offer the best products possible. One partnership that helps us achieve this goal is our collaboration with AB Graphic International.
AB Graphic International, a leading label finishing equipment manufacturer, specialises in developing cutting-edge label converting equipment, such as slitting, rewinding, and inspection machines. The Hine Labels’ partnership with AB Graphic International has enabled us to integrate their state-of-the-art technology into our production process, ensuring that we deliver exceptional labels for our clients.
Here are a few ways our partnership benefits our valued clients:
Quality Assurance: AB Graphic International’s high-precision equipment allows us to produce labels with immaculate accuracy, ensuring consistency in the quality of our products.
Efficiency: By utilising AB Graphic International’s advanced machinery, we can complete orders quickly, with reduced downtime and improved efficiency. This means shorter lead times for our clients, helping them meet their deadlines.
Innovation: Our partnership with AB Graphic International provides us access to the latest industry advancements, allowing us to incorporate innovative solutions into our products and services.
Flexibility: The wide range of finishing equipment from AB Graphic International enables us to cater to various label specifications and requirements, offering customised solutions for our clients’ unique needs.
As we continue our collaboration with AB Graphic International, we remain committed to delivering exceptional results for our clients, embracing new technologies, and staying at the forefront of the label printing industry. Hine Labels is proud of our successful partnership with AB Graphic International, and we look forward to building on our shared success for years to come.
Personalisation goes beyond simply having your business branding on your products. Smart Personalisation is the interaction your customer has with your product and your brand.
My Alexa knows my name, I get in my car with BEX on the registration (sad, I know!) I switch on the TV; Netflix has personalised my homepage with titles I would enjoy. On social media, I can customise how content is presented to me. My phone pings, it’s a notification from Deliveroo asking if I am hungry… which I am!
Personalisation is about feeling ownership of something which has been produced on a mass scale. We feel in control when we know we’re not getting something generic or ordinary. We’re getting something which feels like it has been made especially for us.
The use of personalisation is a simple but effective technique for developing meaningful interactions with customers. It boosts both brand loyalty and engagement while accelerating business growth.
There are a few examples of brands using personalisation as a consumer engagment tool, and you’ll notice they are all big, household names. But that’s changing!
You’ll remember this one! In 2013 and 2014, Coca-Cola GB ran an advertising campaign called “Share a Coke.”
Coca-Cola labels were redesigned to include some of the nation’s most well-known names in place of the brand’s distinctive logo.
They collected a list of the most popular names in each of the UK’s regions. The printing process then randomised those names to make sure each batch of labels was unique.
It went viral!
Following the Coca-Cola campaign, AJ Barr, the makers of Irn Brew, decided to do their own take on it with Irn Bru’s ‘Bru’s your clan’ campaign.
In 2015, Scotland’s well-known national beverage, Irn Bru, teamed up with design studio Jones Knowles Ritchie to roll out a set of limited-edition packaging. Irn Bru bottle labels for the marketing campaign “Bru’s Your Clan” were decked out with tartan from various clans around the country. Using advances in digital printing, 57 distinct styles of tartan, covering up to 11,000 surnames, were released to the public on the bottle labels.
We all love a bit of Irn Bru, don’t we! Scottish consumers feel true pride and passion for the Irn-Bru brand. The tartan patterns made a statement on store shelves and sparked fresh discussions among the brand’s devoted customers.
This became an award-winning campaign, the outcome of which was an 18% increase in sales and a record number of visits to the Irn Bru website.
The Heinz “Get Well Soup” campaign inspired people to bring a customised can of soup to friends and family who were sick. The Facebook promotion let customers put their name next to the phrase “Get Well Soon” on the can. Some retailers even sold them with pre-printed names like “Grandma” and “Mum.”
The brand also partnered with the Starlight Children’s Foundation to raise money for seriously and terminally sick children.
The campaign invited customers to order a customised can of “Get Well Soup” from the Heinz Facebook page. Heinz gave £1 for every purchase to help fund events for children in hospitals.
We now live in an era where personalisation, or creating “every label is unique” packaging, is important to stand out and be a talking point. If used properly, print personalisation may be a powerful resource for companies to get their messages in front of the right people.
However, many small businesses miss out on the benefits of print personalisation because they are unaware of the print technology that makes it possible. Business owners can swiftly adapt to consumers’ ever-changing demands with the help of label manufacturers such as Hine Labels, who are equipped with a suite of advanced printing capabilities.
Harness the unique qualities of your brand’s personality – do it YOUR way.
Always put your brand’s identity first in your execution, as this will give you the best chance of gaining the trust of your target audience. Don’t just copy what others have done, do it your way and in a way that reaches your target audience and their core values.
Want to know how Hine Labels can help you do this? Speak to us. We’re more than happy to consult with you!
Researched and Written by Becky Morris. Edited by Rob Lucas. © Hine Labels 2023
Label buyers in the cosmetic and beauty industry are always looking for ways to create added value in the products they sell; regardless of whether the sales take place in-store or online.
Be it a lipstick or a foot cream, there’s a profound simplicity in their label packaging requirements, driven by what the consumer expects from brands big and small.
The packaging should be the first step in the process of making people feel good about themselves on the buyers’ journey – and be authentic when doing so.
Retailers need their products to project quality but are ethical – and this ethicalness should not just be reflected in the ingredients that go into the product, or is this product tested on animals, but also in the packaging’s level of environmental friendliness.
The up-and-coming generations with spending power are the Gen Z’s, the youngest being around 8 years old and the eldest is 25. The generation before Gen Z is “the Millennial,” ranging from 26 to 40 years old. Combined, this is a large area of consumers who are already driving brands to be more socially responsible and care about the earth. This is the future.
Most label converters like Hine will already understand Digital print allows for smaller minimum order quantities, variation of SKUs, and shorter lead times when compared to the more conventional methods.
The benefits are shared with the label buyer when labels are printed digitally. There is less make-ready time, and a customer can change designs and product ranges as frequently as they please. Got a Limited Edition product? No problem. We can manufacture just the right amount, meaning reduced waste and no need for vast warehouse storage.
At Hine, our digital printing presses are designed with the environment in mind, taking into account the supply chain. We operate at CO2 Neutrality and work to drive down the levels of energy and supplies required for each print. Hine also strives to reduce the environmental impact of its manufacturing and supply waste in its manufacturing lines.
Our partners at HP Indigo have established a program in collaboration with the Good Energy Initiative to offset carbon emissions associated with manufacturing. The carbon footprint associated with our manufacturing is calculated each year, leading to carbon offsetting projects such as reforestation and social investment in renewable energy including solar and biofuel.
You may need a permanent adhesive suitable for the surface contact and, because many cosmetic and beauty product labels will be machine applied onto the product containers – be it a tub, tin, or plastic tube – they need liners capable of dealing with higher dispensing speeds. That means not having to deal with web breaks leading to reduced productivity, and reduce paper dust on packaging lines.
Hine has collaborated with GMG Color to standardise print colour across our diverse fleet of printing technologies. We will operate within the FOGRA39L colour standard for digital prepress and print.
We needed to kick-start the transition at the beginning of September… which we did! 😁
Tackling Legacy Print…
Because we have many longstanding customers, one of our main concerns was how we would deal with repeating legacy work (the stuff we’ve printed in the past and continue to reorder) after moving to a new system.
It was a key point in our initial discussions with GMG.
Our prepress team continues to be instrumental in doing this. To date, they have worked through almost 2,000 SKUs and ongoing, individually assessed, and transferred into our GMG colour management software – making sure what we are printing now is matching what we printed in years gone by.
And our press operatives on the factory floor have taken to these new ways of operating.
Change can be an interesting time! We’re facing it with enthusiasm!
For the past month, Hine has been relearning colour.
To stay ahead of the curve in the world of print software and technology, we must constantly educate ourselves.
Even when you are doing everything you should be doing, an audit can be an exhausting time – There’s the weeks of preparation, tracing the data and paperwork from any snapshot during the past twelve months. And there is the event itself: two days of inspections, assessing the company, from procedures and practices, hygiene and safety, to the documentation and records to back it all up.
The audit I’m talking about is the BRC Global Standard for Packaging & Packaging Materials. This will be our sixth year of holding the accreditation and, like any assessment, the expectations we put on ourselves, wanting to be the best we can be, the anticipation; it all comes down to how well we present on the day (or days). It really is like a long exam.
You may only know what BRC means if you trade in the food or packaging industries. Some of our customers are in the packaging trade, while others are direct buyers for their own markets. Understandably, you may have never heard of it or not know what it means for you as one of our customers.
What is the BRC? It’s the British Retail Consortium, a globally recognised standard for product safety and quality, started by the five big supermarket chains to ensure high standards with their suppliers. In our case, we hold ourselves to the standards for food packaging — which includes labels on the outside of other packaging. But it serves as a model standard for overall good practice, too.
We have a good BRC team at Hine, headed by one person whose job it is to prepare for this day, made tougher by the fact he joined Hine in the middle of a pandemic and a turbulent time for business. He is our Quality Manager, Rob Sippel.
Quality and BRC go hand in hand. Where our quality standards ensure we make the quality products our customers have come to expect, the BRC framework supports our eagerness to do that and to quickly solve any issues which could arise. It ensures we have practical ability to trace our entire supply chain, from the materials and inks we use, where they come from and how they are stored, to knowing our machines, factory areas, and even our staff, are clean and contaminate-free when they have contact with those products.
It means the labels going onto your jars and bottles have been made in a factory which understands it is a part of your own supply chain. It means we take the role as your label supplier seriously, and we understand a trusted responsible supplier of any sort is important in any business.
After a year that saw people being furloughed, it’s uplifting to learn we have been awarded a grade of AA (yes, double A) in the BRC Global Standard for Packaging & Packaging Materials.
The audit is finished. We can breathe. But we aren’t going to rest on our laurels. There is always a need to drive for improvement and we must not become complacent. We have people relying on us.
If you would like to learn more about BRC Compliance, visit their website at www.brcgs.com