New equipment boosts our capacity and keeps lead times short.

Investment in new machinery is enabling us to continue supporting our customers’ increased need for shorter lead times and a more responsive service. As part of a strategy for optimizing efficiency and ensuring capacity, we have focused on three key areas.

We have overhauled our plate room, updating all our old equipment with next generation kit and automation that will enable platemaking in half the time. This means that we will be able to keep lead times even lower for our customers, while completing all platemaking activity in-house to keep costs down as much as possible.

We have procured state of the art flexo plate equipment and software from Esko, which has been designed to streamline workflows, amplify throughput, reduce costs, and drive efficiency. We are now using AI enabled equipment to calculate the most efficient plate layouts, saving time, avoiding waste, and reducing cost.

We’ve also taken delivery of a second Ravenwood Com 500 Coater, making us the only label printer in the US to deploy two of these machines simultaneously. The new coater doubles our capacity and enables us to offer customers a choice of traditional or glue gap linerless labels with our Linerless+ service.

The advanced Com 500 Coater enables simultaneous application of pressure sensitive adhesive and UV curable silicone lacquer, with a Nordson adhesive pre-melting and delivery system that allows for to up to 12 slot heads with screw adjustments for glue stripe widths. It can accommodate variable line widths from 3mm to 45mm, and slits and rewinds multiple lanes into finished reels, in a single pass. With a coating speed of up to 130 m/minute, the new coater supports our technology-led production efficiency, and silicone is cured instantly via the UV curing system.

A fully automated core cutting machine completes our trilogy of equipment investment to help us support greater agility for customers. Enabling us to produce bespoke core sizes in-house, this equipment uses an efficient and cost-effective process that will contribute further marginal gains for keeping pricing as low as possible and reducing lead times.

Our CEO and co-founder, Lewis Cook, commented: “At a time when it seems the price of everything is going up, we’re committed to keeping costs as low as possible for our customers. Investing in our capabilities to increase capacity, slash lead times, deliver on quality, and remain agile enables us to keep our promises.

“Our customers are telling us that they can’t afford to wait weeks for delivery and that we’re the only partner that understands the urgency and pressure they’re working under. We want to mitigate the impact of current challenging market conditions as much as possible by being a true partner for our customers, continually finding new ways to deliver value, ensure capacity at short notice and keep lead times and costs as low as possible to help them stay ahead in a competitive marketplace.”