Commercial printer moves into digital labels with Mark Andy

BP Solutions, an offset house producing mostly commercial print, moved into narrow web labels with a Mark Andy Digital Pro 3 flexo/toner hybrid press.

‘For our kind of work, the Digital Pro 3 stands head and shoulders above anything else on the market,’ said Scott Cotten, president of BP Solutions based in Asheville, North Carolina.

The new Mark Andy press, which was installed in October 2022 is the company’s first step into labels.

BP Solutions Group (BP) began as Biltmore Press in 1925 in Asheville's historic Biltmore Village. Robert P Williams, the founder, began with a small letterpress shop serving the community with personal stationery and business products, later expanding, and moving the company into the heart of downtown Asheville. 

In the 1970s, his son Bob Williams, took over the company exploring new markets including mail services, print-on-demand, and fulfillment. In 1995, the business moved into its current home – a 40,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility in West Asheville. Today, under the leadership of Scott Cotten, who joined the company in 1992, BP has expanded into packaging, labels, and data management technologies.

‘The early 2000s saw a dramatic change in the commercial print market,’ Cotton said. ‘The internet had a major effect on the music industry and educational establishments that had been important business sectors for us. There was a lot of what I would call “copycat” capability in the local area, which made it clear we needed to up our game.’

Upping its game resulted in an investment in a flatbed die cutter, folder-gluer and a half-size 6-color and coater Heidelberg CD 74 offset press.  This equipment allowed BP to specialize in short-run folding carton work, typically 500 to 100,000 sheets but often with 20 or more SKUs.

This new capability alerted Cotten to the package print market, and with the growth of local craft breweries in the Asheville area, prompted by the natural water quality, he began to research what technology was available for short-run labels.  

‘At that stage, and after two years of careful research, I came close to ordering one of Mark Andy’s Digital One toner/flexo hybrids, only for the local breweries to switch from bottles to cans and from labels to pre-print and shrink sleeves,’ Cotton said.

What he didn’t know was that his research would prove invaluable a few years later when one of the company’s carton customers asked BP if they could also supply labels.

By this stage, Mark Andy had developed Digital One technology and launched Digital Pro 3, which was an even better fit for what BP needed. Digital Pro is Mark Andy’s entry to mid-market digital printing, combining flexo with digital toner capability along with inline finishing and converting capabilities for single-pass production.  The press offers flexo capability before and after the 1200dpi CMYK toner engine with converting options including die cutting, stripping, and slitting.  The second flexo unit can be used for applying a spot color or varnish, laminating or cold foiling, and is fitted with an LED/UV curing unit.  The press has a small footprint, making it ideal for small or crowded print shops, a low cost-to-print, and runs at 77 ft/min.

‘It proved an eye-opener for us in many ways, coming from sheet fed offset to narrow web flexo and digital combined, there was a learning curve,’ Cotten said. ‘But we recruited a local operator and cross-trained our existing staff and are really pleased with what the DPro has added to our capabilities.’ 

Since installing the DPro 3, BP has seen demand for labels grow consistently from its other carton customers, who all like the opportunity of a single-source supply, as well as opening-up new opportunities. 

‘From the very first test runs we did on the DPro, we knew we could match color with our offset presses from basic files. With its capability of running a variety of substrates from paper to BOPP, PET and PP, we can easily foresee an ROI of less than three years, which is excellent,’ he said. 

Currently, business at BP is split roughly equally between commercial print and package print, with annual sales of around $6M USD.

Cotten concluded: ‘I’m looking to lift that figure by $2M USD in the next 24 months and anticipate that labels will come to account for around 20 percent of that – if we add value to the company and its products everybody wins, and in today’s competitive market, only the winners survive.’