A Major Transition

2013 is shaping up to be a really productive year. On the customer-facing side, of course, we have the four new flavors that debut this week, and are working on a plan to package and sell our candy gems as an official product.

Behind the scenes, we've invested in upgrading our label process. Up until now we've been using a digital printing process on 8.5" x 11" sheets of off-the-shelf blank label stock that we purchased. That was ok for being a startup, but as we mature, our processes needed to grow with us.

One of the downsides of the digital process was that the colors never seemed to be the same from print job to job. To say that this enraged me might be a strong word... but not totally inaccurate! Just look at the difference between these Salted Caramel labels:

As a company that takes pride the our products' appearance,
this is totally unacceptable

Also a problem: peeling up labels one-by-one from a sheet is time consuming. Finally, I wanted to take the time to seek out a local printing partner (our previous one was in CA).

To make a long story short, we're now working with the family-owned Northwest Label/Design Inc, which is based in the Interbay/Magnolia neighborhood, and having our labels flexo-graphically printed onto rolls. The initial print run happened on June 5th, and I took a TON of photos and a few videos of the process. Upcoming posts will share a behind-the-scenes look at how it all works!