Shrink Sleeve Labeling Brings Savings and More

Little Rock, Ark.-based Tap Magic, a division of The Steco Corp., is a leading maker of industrial cutting fluids used by a variety of machinists and metal fabricators for drilling, tapping, and milling. Some of its most popular products come in a 4-oz rectangular high-density polyethylene bottle that, for many years, was decorated with a screen-printed label. Recently the firm switched from that method of decoration and installed a shrink sleeve labeler and shrink tunnel from Sleeve Seal plus a Sneed Coding Solutions ink-jet coder. The goals: reduce cost and gain valuable flexibility in the firm’s approach to purchasing and inventorying these bottles.

The problem with screen printing, says company president and CEO Ken Gaines, stemmed from the bottle’s rectangular shape. “It required two-color process on front and back,” says Gaines. “That meant it had to go through four passes, and that’s what made it unavoidably expensive.”Tap Magic has found the shrink sleever to be a great solution for three different container formats. Tap Magic

So Gaines and colleagues began looking for an alternative. “We liked the rectangular bottle and didn’t want to change that,” he notes. “When we came across shrink sleeve labeling as an option, we looked first at having a vendor do the sleeving for us. Eventually the trail led to Sleeve Seal, and they were the ones who asked if we’d consider doing our own labeling in-house. It quickly became evident that this would be the way to go.”

Part of the attraction is that by installing its own shrink sleeve labeling system, the firm also solved an ongoing problem it was having on a 16-oz HDPE cylindrical bottle also in use. Tap Magic was decorating these with a pressure-sensitive paper label having a surface coating that was supposed to resist label degradation that might be caused by the oil-based products inside the containers. The problem was that once the bottles were out in the rough-and-tumble world of metal fabrication, some degradation was almost inevitable. “That meant directions for use printed on the bottle could become illegible,” says Gaines. “So now we run those bottles through the shrink sleever, too, and the sleeve label does a much better job of resisting the kind of degradation we were seeing with the coated paper label we were using. This switch brought another cost savings, since the shrink sleeve labels cost less than the paper labels we replaced.”In addition to the two container formats, Tap Magic also uses the shrink sleever on a 12-oz tube format, shown here. Tap Magic