Finding the formula for drinkware success

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.

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.

It was after seeing the Helix ONE machine demoed online by Inkcups’ UK and Ireland representative, Nick MacFarlane, and live at an exhibition that Elliot placed an order. “The technology behind the printing blew me away; seeing the machine in the flesh made it an absolute no brainer for us,” he says.

First of its kind

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 machine and run them side by side, or swap it for one of the larger machines,” Elliot explains.

“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°, full-colour printing is relatively new to our industry. While 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.”

Support from the team

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.

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° 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.”