中文Some of the best business stories at any trade show don’t come from the giant booths with the espresso machines. They come from the smaller signings – the ones where you can actually see a company changing direction in real time. That’s exactly what happened at Loupe India 2026, when Avantika Printers, a Greater Noida-based commercial printer, signed for an Epson SurePress L-6534VW digital inkjet label press on the third day of the show.
The backstory makes it more interesting. Avantika didn’t stumble into labels. The company entered the label market two years ago the low-cost way – sheet-fed printed stickers – and used that time to learn the business from the inside. What did it learn? That demand wasn’t slowing down. It was accelerating, driven by a very specific customer: India’s exploding population of startup and small brands that need professional labels in small quantities, fast.
“Everyone can use a label in some capacity; everything needs a label,” says Himanshu Pandey, Avantika’s director of operations, in comments to Labels & Labeling. It sounds almost too simple, but it’s one of the most commercially sharp observations in the entire industry. Labels are the one printed product that no product category can skip – food, cosmetics, supplements, candles, beer, soap, pet food. Every single SKU on a shelf, or in an e-commerce parcel, carries one.
And that’s precisely why the digital press bet makes sense. Pandey’s plan is to cater to brands seeking short runs, versioning and fast turnaround – the trifecta that conventional label printing handles badly and handles expensively. Ask a flexo converter to print 500 labels with three color variants and watch the price per label make a startup founder’s eyes water. Digital inkjet flips that math: no plates, no setup waste, no minimum-run economics punishing the small buyer.
The L-6534VW specifically is Epson’s UV inkjet press with white ink capability – and white ink is quietly a big deal in this segment. Transparent-on-transparent labels, no-label look packaging for cosmetics and beverages, clear film work for premium products: white ink is what makes those jobs possible. A commercial printer targeting startups in cosmetics and personal care, categories where India’s D2C boom is loudest, needs that capability in the toolbox.
There’s a bigger trend hiding in this story, though. Pandey’s stated roadmap is to serve startups now, then “eventually longer runs as we help them scale.” Read that again – it’s a business model where the printer grows with its customers. The startup buying 500 labels today is the mid-size brand buying 50,000 in three years, and the converter who carried it through the awkward small-quantity years owns a loyalty that no price-based competitor can easily dislodge. It’s the printing industry’s version of seeding the orchard.
It’s also a strategy that only works because the technology finally supports it. A decade ago, a commercial printer adding labels had to choose: invest heavily in flexo and chase volume, or stay out. Affordable, quality digital presses like the SurePress line changed the equation. The barrier to entry dropped, the quality bar rose, and suddenly an established commercial printer with existing design, customer-service and logistics muscles could add labels as a product line rather than build a new company.
For the Indian market specifically, this matters at scale. The country’s startup ecosystem produces thousands of new consumer brands a year, each needing labels for launch runs that are laughably small by traditional converting standards. The converters who figure out the small-run service model – fast quotes, quick turnaround, design support, variable data – aren’t competing with the big label houses. They’re building a market the big houses structurally can’t serve profitably.
Will it work? The odds are decent. Avantika is scaling an existing business rather than gambling on a new one, the demand signal is two years of real customer experience, and the equipment choice targets exactly the capability gap in its market. The rest, as Pandey might put it, is just remembering that everything needs a label – and somebody has to print them.
There’s also a customer-education dividend hiding in this model. Startups often arrive knowing nothing about label substrates, adhesives or regulatory requirements – and a converter who patiently walks a founder through material choices for a 500-label run earns something valuable: a customer who never price-shops, because switching means teaching the next printer everything again. Small-run label work, done well, is as much consulting as printing, and established commercial printers like Avantika arrive with those consultative muscles already trained from years of commercial work.
Source: Labels & Labeling – “Avantika Printers chooses Epson SurePress” (October 31, 2026).
The SurePress signing also rounds out a Loupe India that has been full of these quiet pivots – commercial printers, flexo houses and trade finishers all circling labels as the growth product line. If even a fraction follow Avantika’s path, the Indian label market’s competitive map will look very different by the end of the decade, and the suppliers who sold them their first press will have earned a decade of loyalty.
