Direct Objects: Thinking—and Printing—Outside the Box

One of the most exciting growth areas in print today is the burgeoning field of direct-to-object (DtO) printing. The challenges of DtO include the usual issue of getting ink to adhere to wide variety of substrates (see the feature “Surface Tension” in our June issue) but also transport and feeding issues. If you’re printing on bottles, auto parts or tape measures, how do you get those materials on and off press at a speed that is needed to be efficient and profitable? 

I spoke with Peter Baldwin, director of marketing for East Dorset, Vt.’s Engineered Printing Solutions (EPS), about some of the issues—and opportunities—involved in direct-to-object printing. EPS sells both “off-the-shelf” and custom-built printing systems. A lot of these kinds of applications fall into the category of industrial printing, which means, in general, they involve printing as part of a larger manufacturing process, which limits what you can do with an off-the-shelf system. 

“They always involve custom parts handling,” Baldwin said. “We have to integrate with somebody else’s production line or it’s a new kind of substrate. Really, the print engine is the least of it.” 

Tale of the Tape (Measure)

I am always a sucker for weird substrate stories, so I asked Baldwin about some of the weirdest or coolest (or both) materials or objects EPS and/or its customers have printed on.

“Cold foil stamping,” he said, “or single-pass inkjet on cold foil adhesive substrates. With drop-on-demand technology, grayscale and halftones can be achieved producing photorealistic images. Single-pass inkjet on hard hats, with inline rotary pretreatment. Single-pass printing parts at 10,800 pph with upstream robotic loading six parts at a time from the injection molder. Every two seconds, six parts are fed from a robotic arm tool onto conveyorized fixtures for printing. EPS had to match an existing line-speed and integrate seamlessly.”

Digitally printed hard hat. You can watch a video of them being printed at https://youtu.be/UsAvS-Dc_3I. (Image courtesy Engineered Printing Solutions.)

Here’s an example of really narrow-web printing: inkjet on tape measures at 50 inches per second—and that’s pretty easy to measure!

“Needless to say, tape measures can’t be out of register even at the 100-yard mark,” Baldwin said. (Well, unless you’re the people who built my house.)

Digitally printing a tape measure.

And the icing on the cake as it were, is single-pass inkjet printing on cookies using edible ink. 

Cookie! Inkjet printing using edible ink 

We could go on...

“Full digital decoration coverage of golf balls,” Baldwin listed, “munitions...”

Munitions?

“Explosive casings and things like that,” he clarified. “It’s sort of a cool application. I don’t know that there’s any major technological breakthrough or anything. I should say that these are empty casings. It’s not like we’re running live munitions through UV lamps and things like that.”

Talk about explosive growth. 

Drinking Games

A still-fast-growing market for direct-to-object printing is drinkware. EPS got into bespoke and off-the-shelf systems for digitally printing directly on glassware several years ago and launched the Roto-JET in 2017. A number of other manufacturers have also launched direct-to-drinkware printers (Inkcups’ Helix, for example) and it remains a hot product category.

“Consumer demand remains steady for personalized drinkware,” Baldwin said. “New equipment offerings in the drinkware decoration space are an indication that this market is still not fully mature for the light industrial decorators.”

Personalized, digitally printed drinkware is still a strongly growing market. (Image courtesy Engineered Printing Solutions.)

DtO (Direct-to-Opportunities)?

Reciting a litany of wild and wacky print applications is all well and good, but for the WhatTheyThink readership, what are the opportunities—and ergo the challenges—of getting into this kind of printing? 

It may have occurred to you, that as Baldwin said, the print engine isn’t the biggest issue. Rather, it’s materials handling. If you’re printing on hard hats, how do you move them through a press? If you’re printing a tape measure, how do you feed it through the print engine? And cookies—how do you make sure you don’t end up with nothing but digitally printed crumbs? 

This is where companies like EPS come in, as they can develop bespoke systems for handling unusual materials. This is especially the case if the idea is to produce more than one-offs. Even short-run printing of something like hard hats still needs to be efficient and, preferably, automated. Just throwing hard hat blanks on a flatbed you use for boards or other flat substrates isn’t going to cut it. 

Baldwin cites four top technological challenges for print businesses looking to get into new industrial printing applications.

“Adhesion!” he said without hesitation. “Knowledge of pretreatment for given substrates."

A second is “part topology for digital”—dealing with digitally printing on unique shapes.

“Production flexibility for analog—often it is difficult or impossible to add parts-handling automation to an analog process. And finally finding out if digital can match the quality and speed of analog systems.” (In this case, “analog” refers to screen or pad printing, which have traditionally been used to print on irregular surfaces and 3D objects.)

The challenges aren’t always technological.

“Often, if digital is a replacement technology for an existing analog process, it is establishing a set of parameters for matching or exceeding the current process in the area of manufacturing costs—cost per piece, JIT printing—throughput, print quality, adhesion and customer-driven needs, like personalization,” Baldwin said. “All of these factors need to be weighed and is not simply a function of ROI calculations.”

Sounds more than a bit like considerations that commercial printers need to take into account when switching from offset to digital. 

Direct-to-object printing can be used in packaging applications in lieu of labels. (Image courtesy Mary Schilling Photography)

At the same time, these kinds of print applications belong to specific markets and niches and all markets have their own dynamics. We’ve seen this in packaging, where commercial printers trying to break into packaging need to establish basic credibility—or prove themselves to consumer product companies, who often have tightly knit relationships with long-time converters. Industrial printing of this sort is no exception. For example, printing on medical devices and other apparatus is a growing application for industrial inkjet. But getting into that market can be a challenge, especially if you are trying to bring a digital process to a product that has traditionally been printed analog.

“The medical industry is difficult if a product or process already exists,” Baldwin said. “Digital will often need to be requalified and requires a much stronger case for the change as it takes a lot of effort to requalify a product or process.” 

This all sounds daunting, but what opportunities are there for print businesses who want to get into this kind of printing? Or is it like the old Monty Python sketch about the accountant who wanted to become a lion tamer? Is it “install it and start selling what it produces” or is some other kind of due diligence involved? 

“It takes a one-week integration effort, then weeks or months of a learning curve,” Baldwin said. “We are in near-constant contact with the customer in the initial months. There is great variability based on the knowledge of the customer.  Just as each custom machine is unique, each experience is unique.

“If you were thinking of transitioning, we as a company can’t stress enough the importance of finding a company that is experienced in the field. “Because it’s just a completely different skill set, going from analog systems to digital systems, and your operators may not have the right skill set—almost surely they won’t. We recommend partnering with an experienced company such as EPS.”

This is especially true for companies new to these kinds of products entirely—be they printed analog or digital. 

There is also a danger—and it sounds like one of those “problems you want to have” but it really isn’t—of ramping up too fast.

“One of our customers had solicited contracts for a particular product and then came to us and bought the machine after they already had orders for all kinds of sales,” Baldwin said. “They were new to digital printing and the minute they opened up their ordering system, they got flooded. They literally crashed their website. Meanwhile, the machine arrived and there were all kinds of teething problems, and they just created a whole bunch of ill will from customers and potential customers.”

He contrasts this with another customer who, instead, “bought a machine from us and then played with it for a couple of months before they felt comfortable making a new product offering to their customers. That transition went much more smoothly than the first one.”

Outstanding in One’s Greenfield

Truth be told, it’s rare to find companies moving from the commercial printing or even wide-format printing space into these kinds of applications, and it’s not hard to see why, given the technical and other challenges involved. However, the same was true of many aspects of wide-format printing 10 years ago—and a lot of packaging printing today—so as an industry we have been down this road before. The advice we had vis-à-vis offering dramatically new kinds of print products or services is to add those capabilities as a greenfield project, separate from the main business, and share resources as necessary. If the new project takes off, then it’s worth seeing the extent to which it can be integrated into the main business (or vice versa).  

Digital direct-to-object printing is still very new and there is not a lot of competition, at least at the commercial level. It might be an avenue worth pursuing.

Mary Schilling of InkjetInsight.com contributed to this story.