When panache meets print

As the colder months approach, the focus is turning to the festive season where seasonal demand often determines the latest product trends. From bespoke Christmas cards to interactive packaging – ‘tis the season for printers to get creative and bring their customers a sack full of special effects.

Not limited to the winter months, seasonal printing can be a lucrative market all year round. Whether it’s autumnal events like Halloween or springtime celebrations like Easter, the opportunities for creatives are limitless, thanks to the use of specialised finishing techniques that can turn a simple greetings card into an unforgettable gift.

One customer might be seeking 3D embroidery that brings the design of their printed product to life, while another could be looking for reactive effects such as UV glows or the classic scratch and sniff.

But what are the benefits of adding finishing techniques to your prints? Firstly, it allows you to connect with your customers’ vision, which means techniques such as foiling and embossing can be used to create a more eye-catching visual final product. This allows you to separate yourself from competitors by adding finishing touches that are unique to your company.

Regular business cards, luxury packaging, letters, wedding invitations, stationery, book covers, greeting cards, and more can all be transformed by the use of special effects.

All over the print industry, companies are seeing the advantages of expanding their offerings as it helps to open up new prospects for growth and means they can maintain existing relationships with their current clients.

Providing more engaging and bespoke designs is exactly what special effects allow you to do, and with Christmas just around the corner, now is the perfect time for seasonal sparkle when it comes to printing.

One company always striving for more when it comes to the design and finish of its products is Herbert Walkers. This family-owned printing company, based in Shipley, West Yorkshire, has been in business for 75 years. The company’s heritage is in printing sample cards for the home knitting industry, but over the years, its specialisms have shifted to keep pace with changing commercial and customer requirements. These days, the company specialises in greetings cards and printed carton packaging for the food, drink, cosmetics, and confectionery sectors.

Herbert Walkers is constantly evolving and investing in the latest technology. The company has invested more than £3m in advanced new equipment and upgrades to its print factory over the past three years.

Providing a complete printing service from artwork through to finished carton, Herbert has wide-ranging capabilities in-house, including die-cutting, foiling, embossing, de-bossing, and varnishing. This enables it to tackle any project from standard food products to premium luxury gifting. An ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 and BRC-certified company, Herbert Walkers is also committed to sustainability and helping clients to make the right choice of materials.

Mike Lammas, managing director of Herbert Walkers, says: “Whether it’s foiling, embossing, debossing, or varnishes – or a combination of these finishes – the use of special effects adds instant premiumisation to a pack, giving it both eye-catching visual appeal and tactile quality. For the festive market, this allows brands and retailers to elevate their packaging and make it special for gifting, helping it compete for sales and stand out on the shelf.

The festive sales period gives brands and retailers an opportunity to attract new customers to their products and the added wow factor on the pack from special finishes aids brand differentiation and helps boost sales.”

These days, customers are demanding more in the finished product, they want to see their specifications met with precision and luckily updated technology has allowed this to happen. Lammas continues: “Finishing technology has come a long way over the past decade, for a printer like Herbert Walkers that can handle all printing and finishing in-house, it is easy to incorporate one or more finishes into a single project. While foils used to be standard choices of gold, silver, or copper, now packaging designers can choose from a wide range of colours and finishes, such as holographic foils. Improved machines mean that finishes can be achieved faster with improved registration to print, delivering a more accurate, higher quality result.”

Making something look great in appearance is all well and good, but if it’s done in an unsustainable fashion, then it simply can’t be done. Luckily when it comes to finishing techniques, many are friendly to the environment. Whether a product is embellished using hot stamping, cold foiling, or digital foil printing, it’s still paramount that companies continue to abide by this attitude and make sure they don’t put profit before the planet.

Lammas is in full agreeance. He says: “Sustainability is increasingly important to consumers, so it is a high priority for both brands and retailers, and they look to us to advise them on materials that are practical, cost-effective, and appealing, as well as eco-friendly. Again, advances in technology mean that we can now use fully recyclable metallic boards and create recyclable packaging with foiled details. We have even recently been printing fully recycled drinking cup profiles, using a plastic-free board suitable for food and liquids.”

When pressed on the future, Lammas believes digital embellishments are the way forward. He finishes: “There is lots of innovation happening in the digital space. For example, we have recently printed greetings cards with a QR code that allows the card giver to record a birthday greeting, which the recipient can watch when they receive the card. This type of digital embellishment could also be applied to packaging and is open to all kinds of creative ideas.

Meanwhile, digital embellishment is also on the horizon for foiled packaging, which will enable foiling of short print runs without the need for a bespoke die. In the long-term, this will make short runs of embellished packs more commercially viable, though at the moment, the technology is cost-prohibitive.”

Adding value

When it comes to cultures and demographics, the UK is one of the most diverse nations in the world, and this means seasonal printing can mean many different things to customers. This is just another reason why businesses should offer these types of services as it provides opportunities to secure future clients.

Seasonal printing doesn’t sleep, it’s in full-time effect, and if printers are wise and astute with their planning, then they can be prepared for celebrations and events all year round. One company that knows all about the industry is Friedheim. With a history of more than a hundred years, the company was originally established as ‘Oscar Friedheim’ in London in 1884. Oscar was a paper merchant who quickly came to the realisation that he had a great opportunity to sell machines.

In more modern times, Friedheim has transformed itself to offer digital, packaging, and converting solutions alongside its original post-press department. Speaking on the benefits of using special effects in print, Seth Morgan, marketing manager at Friedheim, says: “Generally speaking they help achieve a goal. Sometimes it’s to be eye-catching on a shelf, or to help deliver a marketing message that otherwise might go unnoticed, or it’s to add an element of luxury to a premium product. Printers are expected to help clients achieve their goals within their budget and special effects allow the same piece of paper to do more.”

One thing that has made it easier for customers to offer these types of services is updates to technology and new machinery constantly being released. Morgan continues: “It has become very easy, particularly the more challenging work with more than one embellishment as machines look to do more in less time, in fewer passes, with less changeovers. Manufacturers like Scodix have made this high level of embellishment more accessible by removing the need for highly skilled operators to complete each stage. The result is empowering customers and providing a high profit margin in comparison. Some machines cater to nearly every specialisation, many die-cutters from KAMA for example will incorporate these effects into the processes of cutting and grooving.”

Christmas is a time for celebration, but it’s a day that brings with it plenty of waste. This is why it’s even more important to ensure that things such as greetings cards and wrapping paper are entirely biodegradable and safe for the environment. Friedheim has a strong stance when it comes to sustainability.

Morgan says: “It is essential. Client expectation is already there. They want to know their goals are going to be achieved without undue waste or potential damage to the environment. For the printer, this means a keen eye on materials and processes; not only ensuring the final product is safe and sustainable, but that the manufacturing is too. Companies like Scodix have been pushing ahead by proactively solving these problems by developing sustainable polymers and new ways to apply foil.”

Scodix designs and manufactures products for the digital age that help its customers reduce waste, save energy and minimise environmental impact. It’s clear that environmental responsibility is crucial to the printing industry, with everyone needing to do their part to help reduce waste and protect the planet from any more potential damage.

As a clean, green process with no VOC (volatile organic compound) emissions, Scodix PolySense™ eliminates plates, moulds, chemicals, and solvents while reducing energy consumption. Scodix has submitted its equipment and supplies for environmental testing and maintains certification of approval for environmental safety and non-toxicity.

Speaking on the future for special effects in print, Morgan is hopeful the demand for this type of service continues. He says: “There is an increasing need for functional special effects, not simply aesthetics. The application of polymers, foils, embossing/debossing can change the properties of the substrate, making it splash resistant or improving structural integrity. These are new ways of seeking efficiencies and achieving goals.”

With the price of living constantly on the rise, the industry is feeling the pressure. Morgan concludes: “With the cost of paper and energy higher than ever, printers and finishers are charged with achieving the same goals with less machinery that can take the printed product from A to B in the most efficient process in the day. It makes sense then that printers are expected to know the stratagems of the trade. For example, the power of direct mail to stay on the kitchen table does not generally apply for a dull low grammage flyer.”

First venturing into the world of special finishing options and embellishment in 2017, Duplo is a company always looking to please its clients.  The manufacturer’s baptism of fire came with the launch of the DDC-810 DuSense sensory coater. This added a range of print embellishment effects beyond simply spot UV to a digital printer’s arsenal, enabling enhanced impact and appeal to printed work.

The first of the range went to Leicester-based Flexpress. Steve Wenlock managing director says: “Short run spot UV is something I’ve been trying to find a way into for quite some time because the only way of doing it is the traditional spot UV method or from competitors, who are few and far between and tend to command quite a high price when you want a job doing.”

Equipped with high definition 600 dpi heads, the system could easily handle both heavy solids and fine detail in the same pass. The proven sheet feeder of the Duplo DC-746 multi-finisher is able to produce up to 1080 B3 sheets per hour and handles a maximum stock thickness of 2mm.

In more recent times Duplo UK partnered with Albyco to bring the QSleek device to the UK. It added an impressive foil finish on top of the UV giving a unique raised foil finish which we called 3D foil. Using silicon heat rollers on the machine and more elasticated foil allowed them to really bring the premium look and feel of luxury print and packaging to customers. Steve Wenlock again purchased this solution in 2020. “The application of this new raised foil technique gives beautiful results, and I was excited at the potential that it could give – we already foil, but this is new, and I expect our customers to be bowled over by it.”

Martyn Train, managing director of Duplo UK, says: “Like all Duplo finishing equipment, our range of sensory coaters are easy to set up, easy to use and easy to maintain, this coupled with the Duplo affinity for automation, makes both the DDC-810 and DDC-8000 extremely easy to use. They both use the same user interface with only a few additions for the larger model due to all the extra features. However, we have found that printers need to truly understand what they are trying to achieve with spot UV and work with the designers. Simply adding a UV layer solid to print doesn’t really create impactful products, however, we’ve seen customers using spot UV to complement the artwork, along with creating textures to give tactile finishes to the products. This kind of joined up thinking between designers, marketeers, agencies, and their printers brings much higher interactions with end users.”

Train continues: “Nothing needs special effects more than seasonal print campaigns during the festive season.

With autumn and winter months, we can see many more effects turning to a more rustic pallet. With oranges, reds, and golds coming to fore, the shinier the better. Simply look at the shelves at the supermarkets and you can see the amount of glitter, gold and shiny reds on display. We can expect an influx of incredibly short run products for Halloween, Diwali, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, and festivals such as Oktoberfest to name a few of the seasonal-specific holidays – and let’s not forget Christmas, the biggest event in the seasonal calendar, which companies spend most of the year planning for.”

Speaking on the future of the industry, both in an economic and physical sense, Train says: “In the current economic climate, along with the actual climate, the question of sustainability will be increasingly high on the mind of UK printers. Not only through a printer’s own processes but also through the perception of their customers. More and more agencies and designers will put greater emphasis on how sustainable their products are. With the print industry being one of the most sustainable industries in England, more work will need to be done on education and the research and development of materials and technologies. Duplo machines generally have low energy consumption, even when not compared to similar machines, as most are single phase, this becomes a much larger factor when the current energy situation is taken into account.”

Rounding up, he says: “Although Duplo sensory coaters and our foiling offerings have come a long way since 2017, we are by no means finished. Duplo has always been ready to take a leap into new sectors and technologies.

But with our current latest machine being so far advanced than our first efforts, it is difficult to see further into the future. We were hoping for a machine that would more easily tackle the packaging sector with both lower micron coverage on the stock but also able to cater to stock more applicable to the packaging sector – which has now been fulfilled. We are constantly asking our customers for their feedback on how to improve the machines and options available to them. We feel the natural progression for many print houses across the globe is to streamline processes, mainly through automated artwork processing and impositions including embellishment file generation to run alongside the existing Duplo automated print finishing processes. We aim to help our customers use our machines so that special effects and embellishments are used in every aspect of print. Regardless of industry or application, the need for products to stand out will only get more important, and so adding special effects to enhance this will be a major growth factor for any print business.”

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