中文Karley Steward-Mize says something in the interview that most second-generation owners think but rarely say out loud.
I feel a lot of pressure to make sure that every decision I make is what’s best for everyone who has spent almost their entire lives working for this company.
That is the whole story in one sentence. Everything else — the awards, the press, the revenue numbers — is downstream of it.
Steward Printing, a woman-owned label and packaging company in Dallas, Texas, has just won five awards at the TLMI Printing Excellence Awards, including Best in Show, the top prize. It was a first-year TLMI member. It began manufacturing labels in 2024.
The winning label
The Best in Show piece was a label called Spoken Greens: Berry Blast, produced for a nutraceutical sports product. It also took Best in Class and first place in the wellness, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical category.
The design is essentially black and white — predominantly black with white text, finished with a spot gloss and a tactile coating. That sounds simple. It is not. A large solid black area is one of the most unforgiving things you can put on a flexo press, because any inconsistency in ink laydown, any mottling, any variation in density shows up immediately against crisp reverse type.
It was printed on a Nilpeter FA-17 flexo press with DuPont plates, Xsys cylinders, Interflex anilox rolls, Rotometrics dies, Avery Dennison material, Siegwerk inks, Uvitec coating and 3M mounting tape.
Judge R Keith Nagle’s assessment is worth quoting because it explains why this won rather than something more visually spectacular: the deep, rich black solids exhibited flawless coverage, creating a striking contrast with the crisp reverse type and sharply defined logo; the fine typography within the nutritional panel showed no detectable over-impression; and the registration of the spot gloss and tactile coatings over the soft-touch lamination produced an elegant, multidimensional sensory experience.
Read that list again. Flawless solids. No over-impression in fine type. Perfect registration of two coatings over a lamination. That is not creativity. That is craft — the kind that is measured in microns and only achievable when the press, the plates, the anilox, the ink and the operator are all in agreement.
The company also took first place for a NutraBio L-Carnitine Sour Candy label in beverage-nonalcoholic, first for a Piper Color Spray label in food, second for a Chi Vibes hair spray label in personal care and cosmetics, and second for an EHP Labs pre-workout label in wellness.
How a carton printer became a label printer
Steward Printing was founded in 1983 by Missy and Kevin Steward as a commercial printer and sheet-fed folding carton manufacturer. Karley joined in 2013 as vice president of sales.
Under her, revenue more than doubled in the first ten years, from about four million dollars to eleven million. She also started selling labels — but they were manufactured by Inovar Packaging Group, not by Steward Printing. The company was brokering work it could not produce.
That is a comfortable position right up until it isn’t. Inovar was acquired by private equity and began growing fast, and the labels Steward was selling were highly decorated, complicated, short-run work. The kind of work where the supplier holds all the cards.
So in 2022 she decided to bring label manufacturing in house. And she made the decision contingent on one person: Todd Tubbs, now vice president and controller, whom she had built a relationship with since 2013 when he worked at Inovar.
Her reasoning was disarmingly direct. I didn’t want to do it without Todd because of his expertise, our relationship. I’m the sales, the face, the day-to-day running. He’s the knowledge, the money. We’re both very like-minded when it comes to how we run a business, how we treat our employees, how we treat our customers first and foremost.
The two bought her parents out of the company. In 2024 they installed a customised Nilpeter FA-17, expanded the team, and officially began producing labels and flexible packaging on site.
The detail that explains the growth
Here is the operational insight, and it is easy to miss.
The Nilpeter press was configured specifically for the labels Steward Printing was already selling — not for some hypothetical future work. It now runs 24/7, integrated with a Xaar digital embellishment module. And crucially, cartons and labels are produced under one roof, side by side, which lets the company control colour matching across both.
That last point is the competitive moat. A brand buying a folding carton and a label from two different suppliers has two colour targets, two approval cycles and a permanent argument about which one is right. Steward removed the argument.
In the four years since Steward-Mize and Tubbs took over, revenue has nearly doubled, from eleven million to twenty million. Since 2013 it has grown fivefold, from four million to twenty.
The culture argument, which is not soft
Both of them attribute the growth to customer service rather than technology. It would be easy to dismiss that as sentiment. It isn’t, and Tubbs’ explanation is the reason.
He points out that twenty years ago Dallas had perhaps fifty label companies. Now they have mostly sold and consolidated, private equity has moved in, and hands-on service has become hard to find. It has become more impersonal, he says, which allows a company like us to thrive and grow.
Steward-Mize adds the operational version: once we get a customer, we don’t lose one — and being honest about lead times, about whether the work is being done here or somewhere else, because blowing smoke might get you one purchase order but it will not get you the relationship.
Thirty employees. Average tenure of twenty to thirty years. In a labour market where print struggles to hold people for two, that retention is not a culture poster. It is a training investment that has already been paid for.
What the rest of the industry should take from it
Three things, and none of them require capital.
First, the fastest route into a new capability is often through work you are already brokering. Steward was selling labels for years before printing them. By the time the press arrived, the customer base, the specifications and the pricing knowledge already existed. That is a far lower-risk entry than buying a machine and then looking for work.
Second, configuration beats specification. A press built around the jobs you actually sell outperforms a more capable press built around a brochure.
Third, craft still wins awards in a market that talks endlessly about automation. The Best in Show label was black ink on white stock. What made it exceptional was that every solid, every reverse, every coating registration was flawless — which is a people story as much as an equipment story.
They won it in their first year of membership, two years after starting. That is not luck. That is a company that spent a decade learning how to be good before it let anybody judge it.
Source: Labels & Labeling — Meet Steward Printing, TLMI Best in Show winner
