中文Trade association meetings live or die on one question: did attendees leave with anything they could actually use? The Tag and Label Manufacturers Institute leaned into that question hard this year, and the theme says it all. ‘Built for Monday’ ran through the 2026 TLMI Annual Meeting like a spine, and the message from the stage was blunt: inspiration is cheap, implementation is the product.
Nearly 500 label and packaging professionals made the trip to the Marriott Harbor Beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the October 25-27 event, a strong showing for an industry currently navigating inflation, technology upheaval and shifting customer expectations. The program mixed educational sessions on industry trends with the networking machinery that makes these gatherings worth the airfare: a tabletop exhibit, speed networking sessions and an awards ceremony.
Monday is where the industry actually lives
Opening speaker Mark Glendenning, TLMI’s chair and president and CEO of Inland Packaging, cut straight to the point. Strategy, he argued, is not the hard part. Monday is where strategy becomes action. Monday is where new ideas get tested, partnerships get strengthened, investments get made and difficult decisions get navigated. Monday is where companies compete, innovate and grow, and where relationships built through the association create value no single company could achieve alone.
Association CEO Dale Coates structured the meeting around three pillars: industry intelligence, operational excellence and future-focused innovation. But the moment that got people talking was her anecdote about an automated out-of-office reply from a TLMI member that read: we are locked in a room for 48 hours until we figure out how to deal with inflation, competitors and technology. Her deadpan response, that she could not believe they only needed 48 hours, landed precisely because it is true. Nobody in the label business has a tidy answer right now. The value is in working through the mess collectively rather than alone.
Coates closed her opening with three concrete assignments for every attendee: use a TLMI resource such as a report or webinar, call one new contact, and join a committee or virtual roundtable. Small asks, deliberately. That is what ‘Built for Monday’ actually means in practice.
A changing of the guard
The meeting also brought board turnover with real implications for the association’s direction. Kristin Yerecic Scott of Yerecic Label was officially named TLMI chair, with Andrew Boyd of Blue Label Packaging becoming governance chair, Patrick Potter of Flexo Wash stepping in as senior supplier, KDV Label’s Keith Walz as finance chair, and Glendenning moving to vice chair. New converter board members include Dan Rosenbaum, CEO of NextGen Label Group, and Rachel Jackson, president of Columbine Label Company, while Nikola Juhasz, global technical director for sustainability at Sun Chemical, joined as a supplier board member. Kristin Shields of Graymills and John Abbott of Abbott Label exited the board.
Awards with a story
The Calvin Frost sustainability winners were announced during the second morning’s sessions: Liberty Labels, Brook + Whittle and Hub Labels among converters, with Henkel the only supplier winner. But the feel-good moment of the ceremony belonged to Steward Printing, a woman-owned, first-time TLMI member from Dallas, which took Best in Show at the TLMI Printing Excellence Awards for its Spoken Greens Berry Blast label, a black design with white text and gold accents featuring spot gloss, tactile coatings and soft-touch lamination. The company placed in five categories overall, a remarkable debut. Individual honours went to John Signet and Doug Bartlett as Volunteers of the Year, Catherine Heckman as Supplier of the Year and Tim McDonough as Converter of the Year.
For an industry that spends a lot of time worrying about its future, TLMI’s bet this year was refreshingly practical: stop trying to predict Monday, and start equipping people to survive it. Judging by the turnout and the energy in Fort Lauderdale, the membership agrees.
The board changes deserve a moment of analysis, because they sketch where the association’s priorities are heading. A chair from Yerecic Label, a converter known for pushing fresh-produce and retail label innovation, plus a sustainability specialist from Sun Chemical in the supplier seat, is a signal of where member anxiety concentrates: shelf-side demands and environmental compliance, not just press-side productivity. Add new voices from a multi-state group like NextGen Label and a boutique operation like Columbine Label, and you get a board spanning everything from national scale to family-business realities. That mix matters when the association decides which reports, webinars and regulatory positions to fund next year.
The Steward Printing story also carries an encouraging subtext for smaller converters. First-time members rarely win anything at their debut awards, let alone Best in Show with five category placements. A woman-owned Dallas shop beating out established names with a craft-beer label built from spot gloss, tactile coatings and soft-touch lamination is proof that awards in this industry still reward execution rather than equipment budgets. For the hundreds of small label shops watching from outside the association wondering whether membership pays for itself, that single result probably did more recruiting than any membership brochure could.
Source: Labels & Labeling, October 2026.
