Our Clients
Case Study - "Happy Birthday" Project
County Labels were asked by one client if we could cut out the words "Happy Birthday" in a self adhesive gold material. The size and detail would be a hurdle to overcome.
Essentially these products are to be used as a component for home made cards, a growing cottage industry. The wording was to fit into a space no bigger than 50 x 20mm and also had to be in a type font that imitates script like handwriting.
The requirement would pose several challenges:
- Getting a cutting form made to include such high levels of detail
- Sourcing a material that could be cut into such a highly detailed shape
- The material had to be in a metallic gold and or silver finish.
It became apparent fairly early on in the investigation that cutting tools would be highly expensive due to the amount of detail required. Also in addition to the cost it was not likely that so much detail could actually be included in the tool at all.
In addition to the cutter issue, we also found that bright metallic silver or gold materials were either made from vinyl or polyester. Vinyl materials are semi rigid in nature so could not be used and polyester is not a material that is easily cut into fine detail either.
Having got this far it was apparent that we would have to look at a wholly different way of solving the client's request.
We decided to look at burning the image of the material using a brass printing plate at temperatures exceeding 190 degrees celcius. This would solve the cutter problem, we could easily get the detail from a plate. However the material problem remained. We found that matt silver or gold vinyl were possible to "burn cut" but as soon as we changed to a metallic material, they were just too rigid to be cut successfully.
The solution was found by metallic cold foiling a soft matt vinyl material as a solid coating, then "burn cutting" the "happy birthday" image from that.
The client was very happy with the results and was pleased we had been able to develop a solution rather than turning them away.
