“We needed to triple our SKU count without turning our back room into a label warehouse,” says Mia Chen, Creative Lead at Nectar & Glass, a craft soda brand bottling in small batches. “Our shelf looks are our sales team.” The brand partnered with onlinelabels to explore agile label production that kept color honest across flavors and seasons.
We sat down with Mia and her production counterpart over a day-long working session. They arrived with moodboards, a trunk full of empty glass bottles, and a spreadsheet of pain points—from ΔE drift on citrus tones to adhesive ooze in humid months. Before we touched artwork, we requested onlinelabels samples for a controlled print/adhesive trial and compiled a reference set—internally tagged “onlinelabels sanford photos”—to compare swatches under D50 light and on the actual brewery floor.
Here is the conversation thread that shaped the project—what they tried, what broke, what held up when condensation hit, and why we chose Digital Printing over their legacy flexographic setup for most SKUs.
Company Overview and History
Nectar & Glass launched with six SKUs and a tight aesthetic: clean geometry, saturated fruit color blocks, and a matte tactile feel. Within eighteen months they were at 16 SKUs, plus rotating seasonal runs. Monthly volume hovered around 60–80k labels, spiking on weekends before regional events. The mix screamed Short-Run and Seasonal—great for design exploration, hard on traditional make-ready.
They bottled in flint glass, 355 ml, straight-sided, with a subtle shoulder that punishes stiff facestock. Prior to our engagement, they relied on a local flexo converter for long runs and pieced short runs through office-friendly options. In benchmarking, the team had even evaluated avery.com labels as a stopgap for micro-batches, but hand-application variability and limited finishing made it a temporary patch, not a platform.
Design intent was clear: tight color relationships across flavors, crisp type at small sizes, and a soft-touch finish without glare. That set the bar for print stability, adhesive behavior on cold glass, and finishing options that would not crack around the bottle’s radius.
Quality and Consistency Issues
Mia’s first complaint was color. Lemon and yuzu panels drifted by ΔE 3–5 across replenishment runs, enough for a customer to notice under store lighting. Flexographic Printing delivered strong solids when dialed in, but plate wear, anilox variability, and substrate changes nudged hues apart over a few weeks. Proof-to-press matched day one; week four told a different story.
Adhesive behavior came next. During summer canning, the label edges sometimes lifted after the bottle left the ice bath. Peel tests showed variability in the 12–16 N/25 mm range on paper facestock when applied on wet glass. The brand also saw waste rates around 8–10% on flavor changeovers, with 45–60 minutes lost to cleanup and registration, pushing late-night shifts.
There was also a tactile mismatch. Their original matte varnish looked good but scuffed during distribution. A laminated soft-touch film solved scuffing in trials, yet it introduced slight stiffness and micro-buckling near the shoulder. Here’s where it gets interesting: the aesthetic requirement that made the brand recognizable was also the source of their most stubborn mechanical constraint.
Solution Design and Configuration
We specified Digital Printing with UV-LED Ink on a premium Labelstock: a conformable PP film with a chill-grade adhesive, matched to a soft-touch Lamination that flexes on a curved surface. Color management followed a G7-calibrated workflow with on-press spectro verification. The configuration supported Variable Data for batch codes and micro-lot identifiers without plates, aligning with their Seasonal and On-Demand rhythm.
Finishing moved to Die-Cutting with a slightly relaxed corner radius to reduce edge lift under condensation. We paired a low-gloss overlam with controlled slip so the label would slide into six-pack carriers without burnishing. On press, we targeted ΔE ≤ 2.0 for brand colors and allowed ΔE 2–3 for secondary backgrounds, prioritizing the recognizable flavor panels.
Cost-wise, we modeled crossover points with their legacy flexo supplier. For runs under 15–20k per SKU, Digital Printing held total cost of ownership due to zero plates and faster changeovers. For a special event batch, they had tried a box of staples labels to meet an unexpected order. It solved the emergency once, but roll format, adhesive grade, and finishing limits made it unsuitable for recurring retail supply. The final plan: digital for the majority of SKUs, flexo reserved for two evergreen flavors with stable demand.
Pilot Production and Validation
We ran a three-SKU pilot over two weeks. Press checks focused on citrus yellows and berry reds—the hues that previously wandered. Average ΔE to master was 1.8–2.3 across the run. First Pass Yield moved from the mid-80s to 92–94% on the pilot, largely by eliminating plate-related restarts and dialing in adhesive laydown at colder application temperatures. A freeze–thaw cycle and a wet-bottle application test cut through optimism and exposed one issue: micro-channeling near the seam. We tweaked liner release and nip pressure to settle it.
The brand also slipped a consumer experience question into the brief: “how to remove labels from bottles” cleanly for home reuse. We added a small QR toward the back panel with removal guidance and ensured the adhesive released in hot water without leaving gum. It’s a tiny interaction, but it matched their sustainability messaging and reduced support emails.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Six months in, waste on changeovers dropped to roughly 5–6%. Changeover Time per flavor fell by about 15–20 minutes because there were no plates to mount, and color was maintained through device profiles rather than mechanical tweaking. Throughput rose in the 15–20% range during mixed-SKU weeks, with operators reporting fewer stop–start cycles. Color accuracy held within ΔE 2–3 across replenishments, and customer-facing complaints about off-hue citrus all but stopped.
On the business side, estimated Payback Period for the digital shift (press time allocation, finishing tweaks, training) was modeled at 10–14 months. kWh/pack dropped marginally due to less make-ready, and a rough CO₂/pack estimate showed an 8–12% reduction from reduced scrap. We kept two evergreen flavors on Flexographic Printing for high-volume months; hybridizing avoided over-indexing on one method. Based on their experience with onlinelabels, the team now plans seasonal micro-lots without dread—and keeps the brand’s visual language intact on the shelf.
