A Look at Printing Embellishments: Marrs Printing, City of Industry, Calif.

There’s a common refrain that printing and finishing specialists use when they describe a postpress process that takes a pedestrian piece of output and transforms it into a masterpiece befitting your local art museum: It just jumps out at you. Regardless of how one classifies the reaction that’s produced — the wow factor, pizzazz, bling — the results achieved from using foiling, spot coating or digital enhancement presses all say the same thing.

Money in the bank. And last we checked, that’s not a terrible thing.

But perhaps it’s necessary to set the record straight in terms of who is interested in these finishing enhancements and why. When one thinks of a foil or spot UV enhancement, high-end product packaging almost immediately comes to mind, such as cosmetics, fashion and automotive. In that case, it may be necessary to re-educate the masses.

Print embellishments are the go-to for the packaging industry, which relies on quality accoutrements to help nudge past fellow products in the eyes of the buying public. For years, Walter Marrs, of Marrs Printing in the City of Industry, Calif., had to farm out that type of work, which was frustrating. That meant giving up control of the job, with potential quality and scheduling issues.

Not wanting to continue down that path, Marrs obtained the MGI JETvarnish 3D with iFoil. He was intrigued by the raised foil and UV options and the special patterns that were possible.

“This provides a lot of options for designers to incorporate into the packaging product, something to enhance the product we’re printing,” Marrs says. “These days it’s critically important to control schedules when you have so many customers. If you have to send a job out to another supplier, and then if they run into production problems … our customers don’t understand that. They’re not very tolerant about that kind of problem.”

Some of the more commons bumps along the way for Marrs entail the release of the foil. Marrs is working on getting the full gamut of colors for the foils. On the whole, however, he has been thrilled with the results, and the ramping up process has been satisfactory.

Marrs Printing has been enticing its current customers with the capability by sampling their print jobs with the effects. The shop has an off-line UV coater it relies on for spot or full coverage, but adding the JETvarnish 3D with iFoil gave the company, and its customers, more options. The raised effect, in Marrs’ eyes, takes it to another level.

“You need to have the work in the pipeline to justify it,” he concludes. “We had just enough [existing] work to justify adding the machine. The ‘build it and they will come’ mentality works in some cases, but it takes a long time and it’s not practical to do it that way.”