Babywise, reputedly the UK’s largest manufacturer of baby changing mats, play mats and high chair liners, has completed an order for 40,000 printed PVC changing mats for supermarket giant Aldi using Roland wide-format printers equipped with Lightbar solvent-UV ink technology.
Based in Lancashire, Babywise has an in-house design and print production facility and recently replaced two older wide-format inkjet printers with Lightbar affixed printers.
Printing custom designs on soft PVC material, which is then filled with foam inserts and heat welded together, has become big business for Babywise, where the introduction of digital inkjet printing revolutionised the production of its PVC changing mats. It has enabled the company to accept low volume orders, including personalised one-off prints, and do so profitably.
The customisation has proved particularly appealing to the designer outlets and small nursery shops that Babywise supplies, and resulted in requests for increasingly larger quantities, that in turn prompted the investment in the faster printers.
Managing director Kathy Cunliffe said: “The Lightbar samples really stood out. The colours were incredibly vibrant and the print itself was practically impossible to remove from the PVC.”
(See the On Test feature in the upcoming June issue of Image Reports)