July 2007 Issue
Behind the Scenes
Adhesives have a thankless job. Unlike specialty inks or innovative packaging, adhesives tend to go unnoticed by consumers. But, they discreetly carry an enormous amount of responsibility to reliably bond a wide range of substrates. Because adhesives have to work with such a diverse spectrum of materials, many times they are tailored to specific applications. For instance, adhesive trends have been influenced by the use of package decoration materials that originate from sustainable resources, says Philip Emery, director, applied surface technologies, FLEXcon. “PLA film, which is created from corn rather than petrochemicals, as a packaging-grade plastic, is a notable example,” he says. “Adhesives are
Gallus hosts VIP Technical Seminar
PHILADELPHIA—Gallus, Inc. recently welcomed 50 current and potential Gallus customers to its third VIP Technology Seminar at the company’s Philadelphia facility. With the new Gallus EM 410 S as the backdrop, guests learned about how to be solutions providers for brand owners, how industry trends should be shaping their corporate strategies, keys to providing customer service, and witnessed a demonstration of the EM 410 S. Key to the event was a presentation on brand protection and the demonstration of the EM 410 S, which employed several processes to create a label using several different brand security techniques including taggants, hidden images, holograms, 2D bar codes,
It’s a Fine Line
Walking a tight rope is tricky business; one slip of the foot can cause a whole mess of problems. Plate mounting is much the same. It is an intricate part of the printing process, and requires much attention. As market manager of paper, print, and film for tesa tape, Joe Prunier is familiar with converters’ plate-mounting nightmares. “I can give literally dozens of examples of when we have received calls from our customers (who say they are) having problems with edge-lift, bubbling, poor print, registration problems, adhesive delamination, and foam splitting,” he says. As a result of these drawbacks, materials are wasted and money
Picture the Perfect Package
Consider this: It might not have taken our ancestors thousands of years to perfect the working wheel if they’d had access to 3D visualization technologies. Because new designs often incur unexpected problems, a physical prototype is often built to test the appearance and/or function of a new design before starting production. All prototypes have their genesis in two fundamental questions: What will it look like? and, How will it perform? Correctly executed, all prototypes also have in common an ability to speed the design process by enabling marketers, key decision makers, and retail buyers to evaluate new packaging as it will really look and/or
The Solutions Bridge
“Counterfeit Colgate Toothpaste Found” is the headline for a June 14 U.S. Food and Drug Administration press release warning that toothpaste with packaging resembling a Colgate product found its way into dollar-type discount stores in four states in the United States. Consumers were lucky this time around —packages were readily identifiable as fake so they could discontinue use or dispose of the product immediately. The counterfeit labels included several misspellings, and stated that the product had been manufactured in South Africa—a location Colgate does not use for manufacturing toothpaste. This is only one example of how a brand’s identity was stolen and reproduced to
User Groups —Tom Polischuk
User groups are a beneficial endeavor put to good use in a multitude of industries. The intent of these associations is to generate peer-to-peer interactions at the user (customer) level around a common technology or product. User group activities typically include the active participation of the company that supplies the technology or product. Chicago-based Radius Solutions, a provider of management information systems for the printing and packaging industries, recently held an “enhanced version” of its annual user conference. According to David Taylor, president of the company, he and an associate bought the company from its venture capital ownership about 18 months ago and immediately began
