Contracts with Colorful Capabilities

Not only are in-house ink labs able to produce ink just in time, they also offer the capability to create a myriad of colors from a blend of a relatively small number of different bases. "The idea of having bases is that it allows [converters] to have good raw material to mix with," Kalkowski said. "Printers, depending on the number of jobs they do in a day, are dealing with so many different colors per day. That's a lot of different ink blends to deal with if they purchase the ink already mixed—sometimes it can be as many as 3-4,000 colors. But you can make that many different colors from just 16 different bases."