Adhesives specialist boosts product offering with label printer upgrade

Bristol-based Ureka Global Ltd provide adhesives, sealants and bonding solutions and services to manufacturing, construction and other businesses in the creation of components, structures, safe environments, and innovative products.

Ureka sell labels to industrial and chemical organisations for use on various equipment and products to provide branding and key information.  Previously, labels were printed in-house for orders of around a thousand or less, with anything higher outsourced from a lithographic printing company.

“Our game is adhesives and we like to primarily focus on offering our own labels”, says Alex Nunn, Managin Director, Ureka. “Whether we’re buying unlabelled products or decanting them from larger volumes, the labelling of our own brand is really important to us. The capability to do our own in-house label printing, and not be governed by manufacturer’s stipulations is a key added value for us. We’re also pushing contract packaging, so the ability to private label for customers is also another USP, and when dealing with low numbers of labels it’s important that the quality of the label is just right.”

Ureka’s in-house label printer was providing them with a series of issues that they were keen to remedy. “The media wasn't right, the ink was expensive and it wasn’t drying properly, but the biggest issue was the lack of support from the company we were dealing with”, continued Nunn.

Ureka met with label solutions specialist, AM labels, at the PPMA trade show, who took them to the Epson stand to see the latest line-up of 8-inch label printers, including the ColorWorks CW-6500. AM labels followed up with a demo of the printers at Ureka's offices.

Nunn Continued: “We needed an 8-inch colour label printer that provided good quality labels. It became clear when AM labels provided the Epson demo, that we’d been mis-recommended our original printer that we had purchased. We tried different types of label stock on the Epson ColorWorks CWCW-6500 printer, including polypropylene labels, which we went for in the end, and the quality of printed label was significantly better when compared with the incumbent printer. Not to mention, the ink dried properly and didn’t come off in your hands.

“This all happened a week or two before the lockdown, which helped us meet our revenue targets as we could develop and add labels in-house to the PPE (personal protective equipment) and hand sanitiser that, through sheer demand, we began selling over the period. Having the ColorWorks label printer, ready in-house, gave us the flexibility to develop labels for our own branded products, as well provide short-run label requests for our customers.

“We’ve been really pleased with the Epson ColorWorks label printer so far. The ink cartridges are significantly larger than on the incumbent label printers, meaning the cost of the ink is significantly less, and it performs well with the BarTender label software we’re using, so the changeover to the new ColorWorks printer was easy. It performs quickly and we’ve had no issues, and the label stock changing and the way it feeds into the head is very intuitive and hassle-free. The ColorWorks has been running pretty much full-time since we got it. We use it so much that we are considering buying a second one!