中文Every converter with a flexo heritage has a digital horror story, or at least a digital hesitation. Labelnet, a flexographic printer with more than 25 years under its belt, used to be one of them. In 2020, digital printing was nowhere in its output. Today it accounts for around 40% of everything the company produces. That is not a tweak to the business. That is a reinvention – and it just bought its second Domino press to keep the momentum going.
The story starts, as these stories often do, with a customer demand the existing kit could not satisfy. After more than two decades as a pure flexo house, Labelnet installed a Domino N610i in 2020 to chase shorter runs and faster delivery. “Introducing the first Domino machine in 2020, we were able to really change our business quite drastically,” said Rob Lorkins, the company’s managing director. That is the understatement of the year. A flexo veteran that suddenly has digital capacity stops saying no to short runs and starts saying yes to entirely new kinds of work.
The strategic logic was smart. Rather than bolting digital on as a novelty, Labelnet used the flexibility to pull studio work in-house and expand into chemical and beverage labels alongside its food applications. It also opened the door to embellished, foiled, variable-data and multi-layer work – the higher-margin, higher-complexity jobs that flexo handles awkwardly and digital handles beautifully. The move was good enough to win Labelnet a 2025 Digital Labels & Packaging award for hybrid production, which is about as clear a signal as you get that the blend is working.
Now the company has added a Domino N730i, and the specs are the part that should interest any converter weighing a digital bet. The N730i brings 1200 dots-per-inch resolution, speeds up to 90 metres per minute, and real-time inline RIP through the Sunrise DFE. Those three numbers – sharpness, speed, and live workflow – are exactly the triangle that decides whether a digital press is a showpiece or a profit centre. Resolution at 1200dpi means the labels look as good as anything off a flexo plate; 90m/min means the jobs actually move; and inline RIP means the file-to-print path does not become a bottleneck.
Labelnet expects the added capacity and quality to support continued growth, faster turnaround, and new digital label applications. That is the right ambition, because the danger of a single digital press is that it becomes saturated the moment the sales team discovers what it can sell. A second machine is not indulgence. It is the recognition that digital demand, once unlocked, tends to compound.
There is a quiet lesson here for every traditional printer watching from the sidelines. The firms that thrive are not the ones that went digital first. They are the ones that went digital on purpose – with a plan for what the capability would let them sell, not just what it would let them print. Labelnet did not buy a press and hope. It bought a press, rebuilt its application mix around it, and then bought another. That is how a 25-year flexo house becomes a 40%-digital hybrid player without losing its heritage.
The broader market context makes the move even smarter. Brand owners are demanding shorter runs, more versions, more personalisation and more traceability – all of which punish pure flexo economics and reward digital. A converter that can flip between the two, on the same floor, owns the flexibility the market now pays for. Labelnet’s two Domino presses are not just capacity. They are an insurance policy against a market that no longer wants to order 100,000 of anything.
For Domino, the win is more than a sale. It is proof that its installed base upgrades rather than defects. A customer who buys a second machine is the strongest possible endorsement of the first. In a capital-equipment market where reference accounts decide deals, Labelnet just became Exhibit A for the N730i.
For the wider label industry, Labelnet’s arc is a template worth copying. The old fear was that digital would cannibalise flexo volume and ruin the economics of long runs. The reality, as Labelnet shows, is that digital and flexo coexist – digital wins the short, complex, urgent jobs, flexo keeps the long, simple, price-sensitive ones – and the house that runs both simply wins more of the available work. The cannibalisation worry looks, in hindsight, like an excuse to stall.
The takeaway is simple. Digital transformation in print is not about abandoning what made you good. It is about adding the capability your customers will need next, and then committing to it hard enough to change the shape of your business. Labelnet went from zero to 40% in five years. The second press suggests the next five will be just as dramatic.
Source: INKISH.NEWS
