"We needed to triple capacity without blowing out our changeover time," says Lina, Production Manager at BrightMark. "Our DTC sticker program was growing faster than our press schedule." Based on insights from vista prints projects we’d followed, we decided to sit down with their operations team and rethink our approach, piece by piece.
BrightMark runs a global e-commerce sticker line from its Singapore hub, shipping across APAC, EU, and the US. The biggest headache wasn’t demand—it was consistency and agility: color drifting between substrates, line stoppages during SKUs switches, and security features that complicated finishing.
We recorded this conversation to capture the turning points: why the team shifted more volume to digital, how they tightened color within spec, and what compromises they made to keep throughput moving without sacrificing trust signals.
Company Overview and History
BrightMark started in 2012 as a small converter focused on e-commerce labels and packs. By 2019, they were running two flexographic lines for long-run SKUs and a compact UV inkjet unit for variable programs. Today, the mix is hybrid: flexo handles flood coats and simple, high-volume repeaters; digital picks up short-run, personalized, and serialized items. The catalog has grown to thousands of SKUs across Labelstock, PET film, and glassine liners.
One of the more surprising growth areas came from creator shops and niche retail, where BrightMark rolled out custom die cut letter stickers as a fast-turn, on-demand offer. The team leaned into Short-Run and Variable Data jobs, using GS1 serialization and DataMatrix when campaigns needed tracking. It sounds neat on paper, but the floor reality meant managing changeovers under tight time windows and protecting FPY% while juggling artwork variations.
"We don’t pretend we’ve mastered everything," Lina adds. "Our weekly volume swings—anywhere from 60 to 90 short orders—force us to pick our battles: keep ΔE tight enough for brand acceptance, keep throughput steady, and keep waste rates predictable so planning doesn’t spin out."
Quality and Consistency Issues
The pain point that finally pushed action was color and registration drift across substrates. On Labelstock, ΔE averaged in the 3–5 range, but PET film occasionally wandered beyond 6 on saturated reds. FPY% plateaued around 80–84% when SKUs flipped quickly, and maintenance windows stretched whenever adhesive laydown didn’t match liner tension. "It wasn’t catastrophic," Lina says, "but we were spending hours every week chasing the same issues."
Security features added complexity. For high-risk listings, the team introduced custom holographic security stickers with microtext and sequential coding. That meant extra passes, more exact registration, and stricter QC gates. ppm defects hovered near 500–700 on tricky runs, mostly due to overprint alignment and foil application tolerances. "When you add anti-counterfeit features, any looseness in process control shows up fast," Lina notes.
There was also a customer education curve. Support tickets kept asking—almost verbatim—"how to make custom bitmoji stickers on android?" The production team isn’t a tutorial shop, but they worked with marketing to build a simple mobile graphic preflight checklist. "We can’t run bad art through perfect presses and expect miracles," Lina says. "So we set expectations and reduced rework at the source."
Solution Design and Configuration
Here’s where it gets interesting. BrightMark rebalanced the workflow: Digital Printing took over any job needing variable data, sequential codes, or quick promo cycles; Flexographic Printing handled uniform brand color plates and spot colors for long-runs. UV Ink was kept on both lines for cure reliability; UV-LED stations were added to the digital unit to cut kWh/pack by roughly 8–12% at typical job sizes. Finishing relied on tight Die-Cutting tolerances and a new registration camera linked to SPC dashboards, with G7 calibration and ISO 12647 color targets as the guardrails.
What moved the needle was a small set of rules. First, lock a shared color profile library—art prepared for the marketing team’s vista print canvas prints assets was converted into press-ready profiles and checked against ΔE targets before a job ever reached RIP. Second, preflight templates flagged variable fields and barcodes (GS1/QR) so operators could predict substrate behavior and adhesive alignment. And yes, marketing even ran an A/B sampling campaign with a trackable "vista prints code" so we could measure repeat orders without guessing.
Results weren’t magic, but they were steady: FPY% climbed into the 90–93% range on short-run variable jobs; ΔE tightened to 2–3 on most Labelstock applications; ppm defects on security runs fell toward 250–300 with better registration control. Throughput shifted from about 18k to 21–22k labels/hour on mixed batches, and changeover time compressed from 24–28 minutes to roughly 16–18 when artwork followed the new templates. Waste Rate tracked in the 3–4% band on typical weekly mixes. "It took three months for operators to trust the new routine," Lina admits. "It’s not a silver bullet—PET still needs extra care—but we’re in a calmer rhythm." In our follow-up, Lina closed the loop by saying they’d keep benchmarking color libraries with vista prints case references so the floor team has a familiar north star.
