The Branding Lab in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, UK specialises in supplying branded garment printing and embroidery to trade customers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, managing director Elliot Sampson recognised an opportunity to assist businesses with the branding of their own garments, and The Branding Lab was born. “We originally had our own direct business, and we were doing our own print and embroidery for our customers,” explains Elliot.
“During COVID, our machines were particularly quiet. So, I reached out to friends in the industry that run similar businesses to me and asked them if we could do their branding for them to keep our machines running. Then COVID finished, and that side of the business had snowballed. We then set up The Branding Lab in 2021 to service trade customers in our industry.”
The trade-only business started out printing and embroidering onto company T-shirts and polos. However, it wasn’t long before the desire from The Branding Lab customer base for a wider range of branded products became apparent. With the personalised and customised drinkware market in the UK experiencing significant growth, providing branded bottles and other receptacles alongside branded company garments was a natural extension of The Branding Lab’s offering.
Elliot began looking into the right equipment to enable The Branding Lab to capitalise on the substantial drinkware printing opportunity, leading him to Inkcups’ range of cylindrical inkjet direct-to-object printers. “Nick [MacFarlane, Inkcups UK and Ireland Sales Representative] came to see me in October 2023 and carried out an online demonstration of the Helix ONE® machine,” explains Elliot. “Then in January 2024, I saw the machine in operation at the PSI exhibition in Dusseldorf, Germany. 24 hours later, I placed the order. The technology behind the printing blew me away; seeing the machine in the flesh made it an absolute no brainer for us.”
The Helix ONE® direct-to-shape cylindrical inkjet printer from Inkcups is the first entry-level solution of its kind, packing the cutting-edge Helix® rotary UV printing technology into a space-efficient, benchtop model. More compact than the flagship Helix® but with all the power, the Helix ONE® produces vibrant, full-colour designs and graphics on a range of substrates including metal, glass, and plastic, and is a perfect choice for businesses looking to explore the opportunities in personalised and customised drinkware as an additional service.
The Helix ONE® was the ideal solution for The Branding Lab, which was seeking entry level equipment that would help them get a foot in the drinkware door, with an upgrade to a larger Helix® model or even an additional Helix ONE® as options for when their drinkware business grows. “We’ve started with the entry-level machine, and in the future, we could take another [Helix ONE®] machine and run them side by side, or swap it for one of the larger machines,” Elliot explains. The Helix ONE® allows The Branding Lab to react to their customers’ needs on-demand, as Production Assistant Toni Capper says: “You could have an order for one bottle, for one print, and then you could have an order for another 10 different prints, 50 different prints, 100 different prints. It gives us a lot of flexibility.”
“It prints full colour, and the quality of the print is absolutely fantastic,” adds Elliot. “We can print onto a whole manner of products. It is mainly drinkware that we print on it, but it's designed to print onto any products that are rotated while it's printed. The technology is revolutionary. Being able to offer full wrap, 360 degree, full-colour printing is relatively new to our industry. Whilst most of the orders that we do run on the machine are still with a logo on one side of the product, we now have the capability of offering full wrap prints where you cannot see the join in the print as it goes around the products.”
For any print business getting to grips with a new technology, a supportive partner is crucial, whether it’s comprehensive training during installation or being on hand should any teething issues arise. Elliot says: “The support we've had [from Inkcups] has been great. We have a dedicated engineer here in the UK that installed the machine, and he then gave us full training on the machine once it was installed, and he’s there for us should we have any issues with the machine. We also have a great relationship with our sales representative Nick, and maybe in the future we will be looking at a larger machine.”
The challenge of a new piece of print equipment isn’t limited to just the hardware. From a design perspective, creating artwork for direct-to-object printing was a new process for The Branding Lab graphic designer Amy Fitter. Thankfully, Inkcups supported the team to ensure they could get the most out of the Helix ONE®’s capabilities. “When the machine was first installed, we were given a production breakdown in terms of how to set artwork for the Helix ONE®, which was really helpful. It showed us how to produce the different layers, what colours need to be chosen to suit which product. It’s made it so much easier for us in Adobe Illustrator because now we've got all the templates set for different products, so we can just easily import the artwork and be ready to go.”
For The Branding Lab, the Helix ONE® is helping their trade customers stand out from the competition with high-quality drinkware products as a memorable value-added service, as Elliot explains: “Customers now are demanding to be totally different when it comes to their promotional merchandise, and doing a full 360-degree print around the products sets our customers apart from their competitors, and we are one of the few people that can offer that as a trade printing service.”
As well as the direct-to-shape printing capability, more broadly, the speed, quality, and flexibility of the Helix ONE® specifically plays a key role in The Branding Lab’s success with drinkware sales. “We've created a niche in offering a very, very quick turnaround, and this machine has definitely helped reinforce that niche,” says Elliot. “We're able to offer a very quick turnaround on 360-degree bottle printing, an area in our industry that some of our suppliers really struggle on. For small to medium volumes, we can turn jobs around in a couple of days, whereas much of our competition has two-to-three-week lead times. This machine has been instrumental in making that happen.”
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