I received my labels today but have to send them back on Monday because the die-cut was off-center so the borders are all different widths. I’m so disappointed; I’d been looking forward to these. The borders on the top and right sides are much smaller than on the left and bottom, which looks silly. The company will get back to me with what they’ll do after I send them back. Small labels with borders are hard, but I followed their margin requirements and these just aren’t usable.
No more time for working on scents while I catch up on orders again. I fell behind today because I needed to go shop for a gift for my niece’s birthday (her party is on Sunday). Spent the morning looking at toys and found a cute huge stuffed pink unicorn and some other fun things. She’s in a pink phase. 🙂 I should be caught up again by the end of the weekend. Hope your weekend is a nice one; we have cool and breezy fall weather here.
Edited to add: I can keep doing the labels myself for now. My printer here does a nice job and I use waterproof label stock. I don’t have a die-cut machine though so I have to hand-cut the labels and that is time-consuming. I’ll find a solution but looks like it will take longer than I’d hoped.
7 comments
Oh that’s such a shame 🙁 I know you’ve been happily anticipating receiving them for a while. Did they not look at what they were sending before they sent them?
Happy Birthday to your niece!!!
Hi Gail! The proof they sent was perfect but it just had the die-cut line printed in red and wasn’t actually cut. Turned out they couldn’t cut as as accurately as they could print the red line. The rest of the job is great — the colors, text, print quality, and lamination all look perfect, just like the proof. But the labels were cut way off center so the borders are all uneven. Before I picked this company, they sent me a sample pack of labels and some of them were just as hard to center so I thought they could do it, and their pre-press people approved the design files I sent. I was so looking forward to not having to hand cut these anymore… I must say they’ve been easy to work with so far and are the only place I’ve found that’ll do smaller runs. They do seem like a good place so this was just unfortunate.
Thanks on bday wishes for niece; they get so excited at that age. 🙂
Maybe I should add a piece of info about the small run thing: I actually had several thousand labels run, but they let you divide the order up into multiple scent names, which is perfect when all the labels are the same except for the name of the fragrance.
Also, if I made the background clear instead of cream, then the border wouldn’t be critical, but I don’t think they’d read well enough since they are small labels for small bottles. People often prefer 15 and 30 ml bottles these days so that they can have a collection of lots of scents in smaller sizes; that’s great but it does make labels harder.
Such a shame about the labels not turning out right the first time. I do still think the vendor should have looked at them before sending them out to you, realizing on your behalf that the uneven borders wouldn’t be acceptable. I hope the turn-around time to redo them won’t be too long. Your additional comment about the clear vs. opaque labels making the die-cutting accuracy more important was something I had not thought about. I like hearing about those little details — so many things to think about as a perfumer/small-business owner/all those other hats you wear.
Hi Amy! Yes, the fragrance is the part I love, but there are lots of other areas that need to be covered, from graphics and labels to website to inventory to paperwork.
I’ve just thought of a possible solution and will run it by the label company. If they leave a clear border around the labels it wouldn’t look bad if the clear was off a bit, and I think I can still print the cream background right onto the clear label material (will check). The labels would be a bit bigger by adding the clear border, but I think I can just squeeze the next bigger size onto my smaller bottles. Seems like they should have been able to do the original design given how good the samples looked and given that they approved it, but I don’t want it to happen again so if a clear border is safer maybe I’ll try that on the reprint.
Since you mentioned it and reminded me, let me just express my appreciation for you (and the other rare perfumers who do this) for making 15 ml and 30 ml sizes available. Like many other perfumeaholics out there, I rarely use up a bottle of perfume and these small sizes are just perfect! Mwah!!!
Thanks! I like the smaller sizes myself too! I don’t buy many full bottles, but I get a lot of decants. Makes sense to me too.
It drives the price up a bit on a per ml basis because the cost of a small bottle, sprayer, label, and box plus labor to assemble it is almost the same as for a bigger bottle; the smaller amount of juice costs less of course, but all the other costs are about the same, so that’s why a small bottle costs more than half as much as a bottle twice the size. Still worth it though when you want a wide collection!