Stic Image is unusually located for a label printing works, situated in a residential area close to the heart of Lyon, France. The company’s owner, Cyrille Roze, is well known in the industry through his two terms as President of the French National Union of Adhesive Label Manufacturers (UNFEA). He has been at the helm of Stic Image since 2015 and in that time has consistently invested in the latest print technologies to maintain a competitive edge in the market.
Roze begins with a brief overview of his business: “The company was founded in 1994, and we are operating on 26,000 sq ft, approximately. 40 people are working at Stic Image. We are working in three shifts. We are a generalist, I mean we are working with the agro-food industry, also on the pharmaceutical industry, and we are working a little bit on wine and spirits. Here we supply between 400 and 500 different customers.”
This broad customer base, made up of smaller to mid-size companies, is the result of a deliberate strategy to reduce Stic Image’s dependency on fewer, larger clients. However, the ever-sharpening client focus on sustainability is no longer restricted to larger brands alone. It is now a consideration for customers at every level, as Roze explains: “Sustainability becomes a very big point of attention for everybody. So we are working on our waste, our energy consumption, what we can save and our carbon footprint. Recyclability is now probably one of the biggest entry points by our customers. It’s usually the first question that they are asking.
When Roze took ownership of Stic Image, the majority of the presses were already equipped with GEW systems running conventional UV, as he explains: “All the machines were working with GEW except two. And I have to say that my experience at that time was that we have had quite a lot of problem with the competitors. So when I had to think about changing the system and buying a new machine, I wanted to go for GEW.”
The opportunity to begin to work with UV-LED curing technology came when Roze invested in new presses: “Two years ago I bought two production lines and at that time I wanted also to decrease my energy consumption, the energy prices were very, very high, and then I had to study what kind of system.” (see above)
After careful consideration he chose GEW’s interchangeable ‘ArcLED’ systems, which enable UV Arc and UV LED to be run side-by-side on a press to get the flexibility of using both technologies: “I choose to go with GEW because my experience with GEW was very good, and the second point was what was very important for me is the versatility of the system, because for the varnish, for the colours, we can go back to the UV. After the experience show me that for the colours it was not really a problem, but for the varnish we decided for the moment to stay with the UV system, because of the price of the varnish – and here the versatility of the GEW system is very, very convenient, of course.”
A further reason for Roze’s choice to use air-cooled LED curing, wherever possible, was the apparent ease of installation, and the lack of any air conditioning at the Stic Image plant. He notes: “The AeroLED system seemed to be very compact and easy to put on the machine. I have no climatisation, so I decided to go for AeroLED because we wanted to decrease the level of heat in the factory, but also we wanted to decrease the level of noise and as far as we had already in place all the extraction systems, we didn’t have anything to do to connect the AeroLED system to our presses.”