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Q I have a small business specialising in natural skincare products. I want the packaging for the products to look upmarket and aspirational, but I have a very limited budget and can’t afford huge print runs for every new product, fragrance or size I’d like to trial. I have so far been using a printing company to provide four-colour labels with spot gold foil on matt clear PP perm, which I buy in rolls and use on glass jars. I would like to be able to print the labels myself, but don’t know what sort of printer or substrate to use and how professional they would look. I also assume I would have to lose the gold foil. I should also add that the logo includes a photo, in case that makes a difference. Can you help please?
Name and address supplied

A It can be a tricky balance, I think, between printing your own and using a specialist print supplier. And it can be an expensive business tooling up with all the necessary bits and pieces to do it yourself, and you are then limited to what you can produce format-wise. Whereas if you use a specialist print supplier you benefit from their know-how and investment in things like foiling kit, cutting gear, etc. 

Your question also made me wonder whether the print supplier you have been using so far is printing your labels digitally, or not? And what sort of quantities are you typically ordering? There are quite a few ‘on-demand’ label printing specialists nowadays, with digital kit that allows print runs of one (although realistically they will still look for minimum runs of 100 or 250 for it to be economical from your point-of-view). And as they’re label specialists they have the kit to do foiling and cutting too, and can advise you on the most economical sizes and quantities to order for your requirements.

One thing you might consider is to create a standard ‘blank’ branded design that you have professionally printed, and which you could then overprint yourself using, say, a relatively inexpensive thermal printer with the various product details as required.

I have sent the questioner a long list of digital label printers – the list of HP Indigo users alone runs to 31 companies – but would like to hear from anyone who has made a specialty in dealing with this type of SME businesses requiring short production runs, and also from anyone who is using a web-to-print interface to allow customers to order this type of product. I haven’t found anyone doing that as yet, and this may well be because label specifications tend to be a tad more complicated than letterheads, business cards, etc.