Nani, It’s Hawaiian for Beautiful
The culmination of the Label Awards competition is one of the highlights of the TLMI Annual Meeting each year. And this year’s award winners will have the perfect backdrop, with the natural beauty of The Kohala Coast on The Big Island of Hawaii.
The Label Awards competition capped off another successful year. A total of 50 companies (44 North American, six international) submitted 317 entries (260 North American, 57 international), up notably from 2006. A total of 81 awards was presented, including 56 first-place honors, along with Innovator and Best of Show awards.
Steve Lee, vice president of RotoMetrics, again served as chair of the Label Awards committee. “There were a lot of very good entries,” he noted, “at the high level of printing quality that we have come to expect in recent years.”
Judge Paul Teachout, product development manager for Aquaflex, attributes the ongoing improvements in label print quality to the application of technology developments that have occurred over the last several years. He points to the increasing use of digital plates and improved aniloxes as examples.
A couple of trends were apparent in this year’s contest. Lee noted the increase in the number of digitally printed labels. Teachout pointed out the increase in entries in the Roll to Roll categories, which reflects the growing application of new product decoration methods such as shrink sleeves, along with more flexible packaging products such as pouches.
And the winners are . . .
On the North American side of the competition, McDowell Label & Screen Printing was the runaway winner, taking 12 total awards, with eight first-place awards and four second-place honors. Metropolis Label was next in line with five total winning entries—two firsts and three second-place awards. Both WS Packaging and YORK Label® had four total awards.
The overall number of winning entries was closer on the international side. Collotype Labels came through at the wire with eight total awards, including six firsts. Germark took home seven winners (five firsts) and KimBells pack won six awards, including five first-place awards.
This year’s Best of Show honors went to Taylor Made Labels, Inc. for its “Symbion Wine Bottle and Neck Label.” The label incorporated UV flexo, spot UV, embossing, and two UV overprint varnishes that resulted in a “real nice label, done very well,” said Teachout. “We saw some real intricate pieces, but this year kind of showed that simple is good—simple done very well.”
The Innovator Award went across the pond by way of a hi-tech label produced by the Schreiner Group GmbH. It won first place in the Tags—Industrial and/or Systems category with its “Double Sided Plastoclear Label with Integrated Microchip” entry. The label is used for admission to events via electronic gates, and had to meet criteria such as proof of ID of the bearer, tamperproof, counterfeit-proof, and read/write-type data storage. pP
