Sticking with it

Stickers, decals, labels – call them what you want, but there’s huge potential for your business when it comes to shaped, printed, self-adhesive vinyl!

Stickers are for kids aren’t they? Well, yes – and that’s no bad thing. It’s a huge market, be it personalised ones or licensed designs, funky wallart or transfers for bikes, skateboards and schoolbags, but it needn’t stop with the youngsters. The market for attaching small decorative or informational decoration to other objects is vast – just take a look around you. There’s safety signage, legislative labels and designer decals everywhere and with a wide format printer/cutter, you can be supplying it. Manufacturing companies need product labelling, you could also supply the packaging – and the point of sale, and, going back to the children, the sticker itself could be the product too. If you’ve not got the capacity for huge production runs (though with our latest CJV300, you’d be amazed at the sort of quantities you can print and cut if you need to) then take a look at the mock-up and proofing markets as well as bespoke and short runs. There are plenty of potential customers out there who will baulk at run lengths in the 1,000s and have a real need for maybe just 50 or 100 decals for a particular project.

 Maybe you have got the capability to litho print labels already, but are you turning away good business because you can’t take orders for shorter run lengths? You can personalise one label as easily as you can 10, 100 or even 1,000 so there’s nothing stopping you responding to the short to medium orders of custom print jobs and making good money too. The range of printable, adhesive materials is ever expanding and stickers can now be repositionable, reusable or designed to last for years – the choice is yours. Mimaki’s unique die cut capability means you can offer your customer a pack of stickers with a shaped backing that’s of huge value – and so much easier and more professional than trying to hand cut or guillotine them.

Stickers and labels are great revenue creators, they’re simple to produce and offer an excellent opportunity to talk to a very wide audience with what’s fundamentally the same product. Your printer/cutter is the ideal tool for the job, there are lots of great substrates to choose from and the software makes it a relatively automated process – so get stuck in!