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“We needed EU‑compliant labels without raising our footprint,” says Marta Selke, Operations Lead at Avenea Beauty in central Europe. “And we had to make it happen before peak season.”
Based on insights from printrunner’s work with SMEs, we drew up a pragmatic plan: audit substrates, lock down color control, and rethink short‑run jobs. It wasn’t glamorous. It worked.
Here’s where it gets interesting: the team committed to sustainability metrics first, then engineered the print stack around those targets—rather than the other way around.
Company Overview and History
Avenea Beauty is a mid‑sized European cosmetics brand with a portfolio of serums, toners, and skincare sets. Most secondary packaging is Paperboard, while labels ride on PET and PE films. The brand exports to several regions and collaborates with partners focused on pakistan pet plastic cosmetic tubes manufacturer label printing, so label consistency and traceability matter far beyond EU borders.
Sustainability isn’t a banner; it’s a constraint. The team set a CO₂/pack goal to move from a 10–15% reduction target into a maintained baseline within 12 months, while keeping aesthetics intact for Retail and E‑commerce. Ambitious, yes. Unrealistic, no.
Procurement explored online and local converters. Someone even typed “is printrunner legit” during vendor screening—understandable when testing new workflows and remote suppliers. In the end, credibility came from audit trails, substrate qualifications, and compliance with EU 1935/2004, EU 2023/2006 (GMP), and GS1 data standards.
Quality and Consistency Issues
The pain points were familiar: a reject rate hovering around 7–9% on complex label runs, ΔE color drift in the range of 4–5 on saturated tones, and changeovers that could take 45–60 minutes on the busiest days. Waste trended high—12–15% on multi‑SKU cycles—whenever artwork variants and Labelstock lots shifted midweek. Flexographic Printing did the heavy lifting for long runs, but short, seasonal, and personalized jobs were too volatile for this setup.
Let me back up for a moment: the team trialed a label printing software free stack for admin printing and office proofs. It helped with quick mockups but couldn’t sustain color management, serialization, or EU documentation. Good for drafts, not for production.
An odd but telling symptom kept surfacing in the legacy office line: “why is dymo label not printing?” Incompatibility between driver settings, non‑qualified Labelstock, and outdated templates. The fix wasn’t heroic—align media types, update drivers, and lock print profiles—but it reinforced a bigger lesson: ungoverned tools break traceability and waste time.
Solution Design and Configuration
The team split production: Digital Printing for Short‑Run, Seasonal, and Variable Data label jobs; Flexographic Printing for high‑volume staples. Low‑Migration UV‑LED Ink was chosen for skincare lines, paired with certified Labelstock and PE/PET films. Color management targeted ΔE ≤2–3 using G7 or Fogra PSD calibration; artwork was normalized through ISO 12647‑aligned profiles. For traceability, GS1 barcodes and ISO/IEC 18004 (QR) were embedded, with DataMatrix codes on batch‑sensitive products. It wasn’t a single lever—more a score of small, disciplined adjustments.
Substrate QA mattered. PET film lots were tested for adhesion, while varnish windows were dialed in to avoid over‑inked halos near micro‑text. Die‑Cutting and Spot UV were reserved for premium SKUs, and glue lines were documented to prevent creep in humid warehouses. The turning point came when the pressroom embraced pre‑flight checks, holding each variant to a common spec sheet before plates or print files moved.
But there’s a catch: low‑migration ink sets cost more, and Digital Printing has a higher unit cost beyond certain volumes. The team set a crossover rule—anything above 60–80k labels moved to Flexo; below that, Digital stayed on‑demand.
To keep sustainability visible, the team introduced an internal scorecard they nicknamed “dri printrunner”—a Data & Recyclability Index tied to kWh/pack and end‑of‑life guidance. The name stuck after they benchmarked templates from online providers. It’s not a universal metric, but it grounded debates and kept decisions pragmatic.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Fast forward six months: color consistency held to ΔE around 2–3 on brand primaries; First Pass Yield (FPY%) moved from roughly 82–85% into the 92–95% range on short‑run labels. Waste went from 12–15% to roughly 6–8% on multi‑SKU cycles. CO₂/pack estimates for Digital jobs landed in the 8–12% reduction band compared to the old short‑run path, depending on substrate and embellishments.
Changeover time didn’t vanish, but it settled into a 25–35 minute window on the digital line. Throughput moved up by ~18–22% per shift on variable jobs thanks to stabilized artwork and fewer re‑starts. Payback Period modeling suggested 10–14 months for the digital stack upgrade, acknowledging seasonality. There were trade‑offs: long‑run unit costs still favor Flexo, and premium finishes add steps. Nobody pretended otherwise.
If you’re weighing partners and workflows, stories like Avenea’s—plus transparent platforms such as printrunner—show the value of anchoring decisions in sustainability targets first, then engineering the print path around them.
