中文There’s a quiet revolution happening in the sticker business. You might not think about it when you peel a label off a craft beer bottle or admire a die-cut decal on a laptop, but behind those tiny adhesive masterpieces is a production chain that’s getting radically more sophisticated.
Route 1 Print — one of the UK’s biggest online trade printers — just made that chain a whole lot sharper. Operating out of a massive 300,000-square-foot facility in Rotherham, the company has dropped roughly £2 million over the past twelve months on a production upgrade, and the crown jewel just landed: an ABG DigiLase Duo with a Dual Bar DigiJet and thermal laminator module.
Translated from trade-show jargon, that means stickers and labels are about to get a lot more interesting.
Two lasers are better than one
The heart of this system is the DigiLase Duo itself — a digital laser cutter with not one but two independent 400-watt laser heads running simultaneously. If one laser goes down, the other keeps cutting. That’s the kind of redundancy that keeps production managers sleeping at night.
But the real magic isn’t just the cutting speed. It’s what you can cut. Intricate custom shapes, decal-style products with complex contours, short-run jobs that would have required expensive metal dies just a few years ago — all of it now runs through the same digital workflow, no tooling required.
Then there’s the Dual Bar DigiJet, which brings digital embellishment into the same pass. Spot varnish. Foiling. Tactile effects that you can feel with your fingertips. All of it applied digitally, in a single run, without the cost or lead time of traditional finishing tools.
Jack Parks, head of Route 1 Print, frames it in terms that print resellers will immediately understand: “They can offer their clients short-run, high-quality labels with fast turnarounds and competitive trade pricing… without relying on long-winded offline quoting and proofing processes.”
AI enters the sticker game
This investment isn’t just about hardware. Route 1 Print also launched an AI-powered Custom Shape Proofing Tool that eliminates one of the most tedious back-and-forths in label production — the endless email chains about cutter files.
Resellers no longer need to chase their clients for technical files. The AI handles the shape definition automatically. That might sound like a small thing, but anyone who has spent hours going “no, send me the .ai file, not the .pdf” knows exactly how much friction this removes.
The company has also redesigned its entire stickers and labels ordering journey, created unbranded sample packs for resellers to use in their own sales pitches, and expanded into new materials — transparent polypropylene, silver metallic, Grit Touch lamination.
The bigger play
Route 1 Print isn’t just upgrading for the sake of shiny new equipment. The stickers and labels category is growing fast, and the company sees an opportunity to capture premium work — food and drink labeling, cosmetic packaging, pharmaceutical compliance labels — that has traditionally gone to specialist converters.
By combining digital laser cutting, inline embellishment, and thermal lamination in one automated setup, they’ve built a platform that can handle complex, high-margin label work at scale while keeping prices low enough for trade customers to build their own healthy margins.
Mark Norman, ABG’s technical director, called the DigiLase Duo “a significant step forward in digital finishing technology.” For the print resellers buying from Route 1 Print, it means one thing: more options, faster turnaround, and stickier margins.
Pun absolutely intended.
Source: Labels & Labeling — Route 1 Print invests in ABG DigiLase Duo
