John Penhallow10.10.14
Pirkanmaan Laatuetiketti Oy
Keskitie 3, 33470 Ylöjärvi, Finland
laatuetiketti.fi
Ask anyone in Europe where Finland is and they will probably jab a finger up in the air to indicate that it’s “somewhere up in the far North.” This small country with its population of 5.5 million is situated almost exactly on the same latitude as Alaska. Finland boasts a high standard of living, a stable government, and a language which resembles no other on earth (except Estonian and, very vaguely, Hungarian). Readers of L&NW will know that the country is also famous as the home of UPM Raflatac, one of the world’s leading producers of pressure sensitive labelstock.
As well as being a major labelstock exporter, Finland is home to a dozen label converters, who share a local market of around 45 million square meters. Not the biggest of these converters, but certainly the youngest, is Pirkanmaan Laatuetiketti Oy.
Founded in 2007 when it bought its first press, a Nilpeter FB3300, Laatuetiketti concentrated from the start on providing fast service for small and medium-sized customers in a wide variety of end user sectors. The formula proved successful, and in 2012 Laatuetiketti added digital to its armory with a Primera CX/FX1200e printing and converting line. This was followed in early 2014 by the installation of a second Nilpeter. Commercial manager Timo Rouvi explains: “As I say to our existing and potential customers ‘no branch of industry or retail is beyond our capabilities.’ Our customers are mainly in the non-food sector but we also have a few big (for Finland) customers from the food market. Digital printing and converting means we can now serve especially small-scale manufacturers as well as bigger customers with smaller needs. For example, in Finland, we have many new microbreweries and we have succeeded in getting quite a lot of them as customers.” Pressure-sensitive labels are Laatuetiketti’s main product, but the company also prints rolls of wet-glue and thermal transfer labels and supplies different brands of labeling systems.
With its capital, Helsinki, only a few hours’ drive from St Petersburg, Finland’s trade with Russia blossomed after the end of communism, and, for a while, exports of labels to Russia boomed. But today, for Finland’s label converters these halcyon days are over. Timo Rouvi explains: “Nowadays the Russians make their own labels and their labor costs are lower than ours. It’s much the same problem with the Estonians, with the additional factor that Finland and Estonia are not only neighbors but also both members of the European Union and of the Euro zone. The Estonians are making rather heavy efforts to enter the Finnish label markets, and some of them already have quite a considerable market share. Under these conditions we cannot expect much in the way of export orders. We do however deliver to all parts of Finland; the northernmost customer we have is located north of the Arctic Circle and the southernmost is located on the south coast of Finland.” (To put this in perspective, it’s the same as the distance between Anchorage and Prudoe Bay!)
When your market is right on the periphery of Europe you might expect to have difficulty getting certain inputs and equipment, but according to Timo Rouvi, this is not the case. UPM Raflatac is unsurprisingly one of the company’s main labelstock suppliers, although Laatuetiketti is “open to every labelstock supplier and has received different kinds of label laminates from other suppliers.” As for inks, the company buys from Flint and Siegwerk. Although neither of them manufacture in Finland, Timo Rouvi reports that cooperation with these two companies has been good, and orders take only a few days to be delivered. Diecutting tools, he adds, come from Germany and also arrive within a few days of ordering.
Press operator Jaakko Ilmonen has nothing but praise for the company’s two Nilpeter presses, the more recent of which, installed this year, is a six-color flexo press 3300S with cold foiling capability, crossover unit, hot air drying and UV curing. “Totally reliable, no downtime,” is all he has to say. The Danish press manufacturer’s sales and service network is well established throughout the Scandinavian countries, but some customers were hesitant to entrust their labels business to a converter with just one flexo press – hence the decision to double up with a second machine. As Laatuetiketti’s clientele consists mainly of smaller companies, it felt early on the need to explore the possibilities of digital printing. In 2008, when Timo Rouvi started looking for a system that could print good-quality short-run labels, he heard about Primera’s inkjet printing systems. But the print quality of these small desktop printers available at the time was not good enough for what the company wanted. Rouvi however kept in touch with Abraxco Oy, the local distributor for Primera. “One day, my friend at Abraxco called me and told me about a new system. The print quality was on a completely new level compared to inkjet systems,” says Rouvi. “One thing led to another, and we installed a Primera CX1200e Color Label Press combined with the FX1200e Digital Finishing System at the beginning of 2012. Now, with this digital solution to back up our two flexo presses, we are able to offer a wider range of labels to our existing customers. This means, in particular, we do not have to subcontract work on more limited quantities,” Labels produced by Laatuetiketti on the CX/FX system are mainly full color, but occasionally blank labels. Run lengths can be under 100 labels, going up to around 15,000 (small) labels for the biggest orders run on digital, says Rouvi.
The sales figures have risen dramatically and are at the moment about €1.2 million. The growth has been steady, according to Rouvi, “But we don’t have any exact figures we should reach every year in the future – the growth comes with a job well done,” The most remarkable statistic is the number of employees – just six, including the co-owners. “Yes,” says Rouvi. “There are just six of us. We operate mainly in one shift, every now and then we have longer runs and then we just have a longer working day, starting at 6 AM, for example, and lasting to 6 PM. You don’t get that kind of flexibility at a bigger company.”
“The biggest step to expand our business recently was taken when we invested in the second press,” explains Rouvi. “We aren’t a small one-press converter any more. Now we have more capacity and are seen as a more reliable supplier. This reliability, along with quality printing and rapid delivery, bring high value to our customers. Those facts are of course universal, but we have a feeling that we have succeeded with these in most cases.
“Even before we printed our first label we set up a website, and since then we have updated the pages and created new ones with several improvements. We also get new business with our printed brochure, which contains hints and instructions to a label buyer. This kind of brochure might be considered old-fashioned, but it is a very effective way to tell who we are and what we do,” Rouvi says.
Rouvi is aware that in the label business, growth doesn’t come rapidly but with patience and hard work. He says, “Our customers are quite often small businesses so you have to have a lot of small clients to get turnover. Luckily, we also have bigger clients, but when you have enough small ones you get good end-results. During the short period of our existence, there has been a Europe-wide recession, and despite this we have managed to create a successful company. The recession has to stop some day, and until then I’m convinced we can survive and prosper.”