Association of Label Printers and Suppliers (ALPS) in association with Avery Dennison recently celebrated World Label Day at Chelmsford Club, New Delhi. The event was well attended by brand owners, converters, machine manufacturers and suppliers, materials suppliers, and ink and adhesive manufacturers. Welcome note at the event was presented by Gururaj Ballarwad, president, Association of Label Printers and Suppliers.
The keynote presentation was delivered by Abhay Gupte of Manipal Technologies who talked about convergence of label innovations with emerging market segment and end-user trends. Gupte said, “The label industry is growing significantly due to a lot of changes taking place in the industry in last several years. Each member of the ecosystem, be it brand owners, converters, suppliers, machine manufactures as well as recyclers which has joined in now have played a very crucial role in this journey so far.”
Emphasizing on waste prevention and minimization, Gupte said, “Today, e-Commerce is 10% of retail. While touch and feel of a label plays a big role in retail, we simply buy a product from an e-Commerce platform by seeing a digital picture of the product. So, for these 10% products, we now have to decide whether we really need to spend big bucks on high-end labels, technology which is surface-based, luxurious primary packaging since products are re-packed for mailing by e-Retailers, and on value additions that technically becomes obsolete since users buy a product based on the product image.”
Speaking next, Sanjeev Sondhi of Zircon Technologies India gave a presentation on ‘Innovate or die: How to remain relevant for the brands in pressure sensitive labels’. Sondhi said that label converters should try to make their company profitable by streamlining their in-house processes. “To survive in this competitive market, we have to redefine innovation. We should not only innovate for our customers but also for ourselves – for our company. Innovation should start inside the company for the company first.”
The event concluded with a panel discussion ‘Label industry ecosystem: How prepared are we to bring new products or technologies to market – a pesrpective’ moderated by Ashish Gupta of Swash Papertech. The panelist were Ajay Aggarwal of Syndicate Labels; Amit Ahuja of Multitech; Barun Banerjee of Nestle India; Manoj KM of Avery Dennison; Sekhar Pal of Cargill India; and Sudhir Jain of Jian Transfer.
