Why Lacquer Dye Printing is The Most Popular with Water Bottle Wholesalers?

In general, Water bottle wholesalers prefer to have their own unique designs over solid colored water bottles. From simple to complex, in turn, should be laser engraving logo, silkscreen printing logo, heat transfer printing logo, lacquer dye printing logo and water transfer logo.

First, lacquer dye printing imposes no limit on the number of colors in a design.

Attached is one picture for reference.

Model 1 shows the laser engraving logo, this process is etching the surface of stainless steel, so the color displayed can only be the original color of stainless steel—silver.

Model 2 shows the silkscreen printing logo. Generally speaking, a silkscreen printing logo is mostly 1 color, no more than 2-3 colors. There needs to be some space between each color, otherwise, it will cause difficulties in the production. You can check out our other article on the silkscreen printing logos.

Model 3 shows the heat transfer printing logo. Although heat transfer printing can also do multicolor logos, it can only be printed on flat surfaces.

Model 4 shows the lacquer dye printing logo, is it the most vivid and beautiful?

So, what are the other main advantages of lacquer dye printing?

1. Very competitive price than water transfer printing.

The most attractive point for customers is that the lacquer dye printing logo is half the price of water transfer printing, but can achieve the same effect like a water transfer printing logo. Therefore, customers consider the cost performance, in the case of insufficient cost, customers prefer to lacquer dye printing rather than water transfer printing.

Like these below two wood-grain cola bottles, the left side is lacquer dye printing, the right side is water transfer printing. There’s not much difference at first glance, the effect is the same.

2. Larger printable area than heat transfer printing.

Compared with heat transfer printing which can only be printed on a flat surface, the printing range of lacquer dye printing is larger. The neck and uneven edges of the cup can be covered to achieve full-body printing. You can decorate the entire cup to make it look more vivid. 

Heat transfer printing:10cm one round of the cup

Lacquer dye printing: whole cup

If the customer really wants to customize the lacquer dye printed cup, also needs to have a certain understanding of its manufacturing process and disadvantages.

The three main production steps are as follows:

Step 1 / The stainless steel cup was originally silver color, if the pattern is printed directly, it may cause the pattern to change color and not so clear. Therefore, a basic work we need to do is to spray a layer of high-temperature resistant white primer on the body of the cup, and then put it into the oven to fix the color under high temperature. This is the most important basic step.

Step 2 / Wrap the whole cup carefully with the film paper printed with the customer’s design. This requires workers to have enough experience and wrap the paper tightly and neatly. Experienced workers can reduce the occurrence of folds and make the pattern as complete as possible in the folded part, for example, arrange the folds in the middle part rather than the head or tail. Try not to make the design look so strange because it’s missing important parts. But in uneven places, the design should not be perfect, this can’t be avoided.

Step 3 / Finally, arrange the wrapped cups neatly in the oven, steam, and bake them at high temperature to transfer the patterns and colors on the film paper to the cups.

And how to calculate the price of lacquer dyeing printing?

Usually, we need customers to pay extra cost for design film paper, usd60/col. The cost of the design film is determined by the color of the design. However, it’s not the number of colors we see intuitively. For example, we see that there are only 3-4 colors in the design, but more colors may be needed in practice, which requires professional technical personnel to analyze, so the customer needs to understand the difference in numbers.

There is also the labor cost, which needs no explanation. Compared with solid-color cups, lacquer dye printed cups need to go into the oven twice more, and we need to manually wrap the design paper into cups, which is very time-consuming.

Finally, we also need to clear some shortcomings of lacquer dye printing.

1. Protect the cup body, do not let the surface of the cup stick to dust.

In the process of printing, the storage of the cup must be very careful. If the printing has not started for a long time or there is dust in the air, uneven particles will appear on the printing surface of the cup, which is not beautiful.

2. Wrapping the film paper carefully to avoid excessive creases.

Creases in the neck and bottom of the cup are unavoidable. We believe that customers need to know this feature in advance. If it is unacceptable, customers can choose a heat transfer printing logo or the water transfer printing logo.

3. Film paper seams are easy to overlap.

This is unavoidable, and can only be carefully handled in the production process, do not let the seams be too big or too exaggerated. Generally, we require workers that the joint should not be greater than 0.5cm.

4. The pattern might be uneven.

We use the below picture to illustrate this weakness, though it is less obvious in other designs. Workers are usually more careful with such designs. But you can see that the height of the pattern is still slightly different. As long as you don’t put several cups together, each individual cup should be no problem. Hope customers can also understand.

With the understanding of customers, our efforts, and the development of technology in the future, we believe that we will do better and better!