Manufacturing
Rigid boxes and folding cartons, made in our own factory in Shenzhen since 1999. Printing, foiling, die-cutting, assembly and inspection all take place under one roof, on equipment you are welcome to come and see.
01 · The pressroom
3 Heidelberg and 2 manroland. 5 presses rather than one means your job runs on the machine that suits it. 11 units for special colours and foil. A full 1,420 mm sheet for wraps that have to cover a box in one piece. Perfecting for anything with a printed interior.
Printing in a single pass matters more than it sounds. Every time a sheet re-enters a press it can shift by a fraction of a millimetre, and on packaging that shift becomes a soft edge, a halo around a keyline, or a colour that does not quite match the order you placed last year. On the 11-colour, cold foil is applied inline on the same pass, so metallic areas register to the artwork rather than being stamped on afterwards.
Press 01
11 printing units in one line. Several brand colours, metallics and varnish all go down on a single pass, and cold foil is applied during the run and printed over rather than stamped on afterwards. It is the press most of our rigid box work runs on.
11 colours · cold foil · UV · coating
750 × 1,050 mm
Metallic decoration
Press 02
Most converters stop at B1. This press takes roughly twice that area, so a full-sheet wrap that has to cover an entire box in one piece stays in the building rather than being joined.
6 colours · inline coating
1,020 × 1,420 mm
Oversized formats
Press 03
A perfecting configuration, printing the outside and the inside of the sheet in one pass. Fewer passes means less handling, and less handling means less to go wrong on a printed liner. Most gift and presentation packaging has one.
6 colours · perfecting · inline coating
740 × 1,040 mm
Both sides in one pass
Press 04
6 colours plus a coating unit. The folding carton workhorse, and the press that holds a delivery date when the 11-colour is committed to a longer run.
6 colours · inline coating
720 × 1,020 mm
Folding carton volume
Press 05
The second 6-colour Heidelberg. 2 comparable presses mean 2 jobs run in parallel, and a maintenance window on one does not move your dates.
6 colours · inline coating
740 × 1,040 mm
General production
Why 11 units matters to you
Brand colours rarely sit inside the standard 4-colour range. A 4-colour shop has to build yours from CMYK, and a build drifts with dot gain, ink density and paper batch. 11 units mean your Pantone is mixed as an ink and printed as itself, from a recipe we keep on file for the reorder.
02 · Rigid boxes
Almost everywhere in the world, a rigid box is wrapped and assembled by a person at a bench. Ours are positioned by camera and formed on a line.
This is the reason rigid box minimums are usually high. Hand assembly does not get cheaper as the order grows, so the cost per box barely falls and factories set a floor to make the job worth taking.
It is also why hand assembly produces a spread. Some boxes are square, some are not, and the ones that are not are found by your team rather than by ours. The same camera positions every wrap on our forming lines, so the tolerance on box 5,000 is the tolerance on box 5.
And because assembly is a setup rather than a labour cost, the price does not collapse between a small run and a large one the way it does elsewhere. Our people do the setup, the first-off approval and the work that actually needs judgement.
On the line
The practical consequence
Shorter runs stop being a favour and start being a product. If you need 500 rigid boxes rather than 5,000, that is a conversation worth having with us rather than one you have to win.
03 · Folding cartons
Flat blanks are folded and glued along a continuous line, then counted and bundled without being touched by hand.
Several lines run in parallel. That is what lets us hold a delivery date when a job turns out larger than expected, or when artwork arrives later than planned.
It is the least photogenic part of a factory and the part that most often determines whether your boxes arrive on time. A single line is a single point of failure, and the only way to hold an original date is to move the work onto another line that is already running.
On the line
Why parallel capacity matters to you
Capacity is the part of a quotation nobody asks about until it is too late. Ask us what else is on the line in the week your job is scheduled, and we will tell you.
04 · Tooling and sampling
Every box shape needs a steel-rule cutting die built before anything can be produced. Ours are made in this building, so a revised structure comes back in days rather than weeks.
Before any tooling is cut, we produce a physical sample on our own tables so you can hold the box, close the lid and see whether the construction actually works. Structural problems are obvious the moment a box is in front of you and close to invisible on screen. A crease slightly out of position, or at the wrong depth for the calliper of the board, produces a box that never quite shuts square.
That matters more than it sounds when a launch date is already fixed. A sampling round sent to an outside workshop is a fortnight; here it is a Tuesday.
On the line
05 · Colour and pre-press
Plates are imaged here, proofs are printed for your approval, and colour is measured with instruments rather than judged by eye.
Final approval happens under a standard light source, so “correct” does not depend on the lighting in the room it is being looked at in. Two people in two countries signing off the same box under two different lamps is how a colour argument starts, and a booth is how it is avoided. Drift is caught on the press rather than in your warehouse, and the ink recipe stays on file for the reorder.
On the line
06 · Quality control
The board is tested in our own laboratory before it is committed to a job, and the printed work is measured against an agreed tolerance rather than an opinion.
A stock that will not survive the fold or the freight is caught before it reaches the press rather than after your boxes are made. Below is a selection of what we measure and what each instrument is actually for. The full list is available on request.
| Instrument | What it checks |
|---|---|
| X-Rite i1 spectrophotometer | Printed colour against agreed tolerance |
| X-Rite barcode verifier | Barcode grade to ISO 15416 |
| Viewing booth, D50 and D65 | Colour approval under controlled light |
| Anti-mixing scanner | Wrong printed component reaching the wrong box |
| Transport test machine | Packed cartons under shipping vibration |
| Edge crush tester | Stacking strength |
| Rub resistance tester | Print durability in transit |
| Temperature and humidity chamber | Behaviour in different climates |
| 2D measuring device | Finished dimensions against drawing |
07 · Under one roof
A job that moves between 3 subcontractors gains a delay and a person to blame at every boundary. Here it does not leave the building.
Printing, foiling, die-cutting, assembly, inspection and dispatch are all ours to schedule, and all of it can be seen on a single visit.
Occasionally a finish calls for a machine we do not hold, such as flocking, thermoforming or production laser cutting. When that happens we say so on the quotation, not afterwards.
08 · What we can make
Everything below runs on the automatic lines. If what you want is not here, ask anyway.
Rigid boxes
Folding cartons
Finishes
Fittings
More unusual constructions can still be built, but they go to a bench rather than a line, which changes both the cost and the lead time. If a construction falls outside the list, say so early and we will price it properly rather than guess.
Tell us what you have in mind, in as much or as little detail as you like. We will tell you honestly whether it is something we can do well, and what it would involve. If it is not for us, we will say so. We keep a full equipment inventory for supplier questionnaires and audits, and will send it on request.