Perfect Print On-Demand Color Label Example

Founded in 1987 as a local wholesaler of products for the cabinet and furniture trades, QuickScrews International Corporation (www.quickscrews.com) has evolved into the supplier of the most popular brand of fasteners in the industry; including their new solar division (https://solarroofhook.com/). Their highly trained and experienced personnel are ready to discuss their customer’s needs to deliver on the promise “Get the Screws You Need Faster Than Ever”. QuickScrews uses technology to service many different categories of customers; from weekend warriors looking to finish a project, large cabinetmakers or solar roof installers, or wholesalers looking to support their customers. In 2010, QuickScrews began selling their products online, which expanded their customer base to more than 10,000 customers and shipping orders within 24 hours of receipt.

From my perspective, QuickScrews is the perfect example of a company needing to print color labels on demand. With thousands of SKU’s, QuickScrews uses colors and icons to differentiate types of fasteners. With their solar products, here are their color codes:

QuickScrews Color Codes

And here are icons in use on one of their products:

QuickScrews Variable Icons

Quickscrews prints these labels using the C3500 in stations distributed in their plants in Livermore, CA and in South Carolina.

And they have experimented using a very inexpensive Go-Dex unwinder to feed large rolls of labels into the C3500. And it works seemingly great!

C3500 with Inexpensive GoDex Unwinder

But the real magic of the QuickScrews print on-demand color label solution is their database of products and their deployment of BarTender. According to Mark Buechler, Senior IT Manager for QuickScrews, “our Marketing department has spent a lot of time gathering information and taking pictures of many different fasteners for our database. We’ve worked hard not only setting up the structure of our database in Excel, but also adding the descriptors, color codes, and variable images associated with every single SKU we sell. It’s a process that will never end”.

In addition to the database, Mark has deployed BarTender, designing different label templates and setting up the network to pull the variable data, including the different text descriptors, icons and color codes to create the labels. According to Mark, “now each print station in either CA or SC accesses BarTender to print the labels required for each product. This solution makes it easy for our operators to label our products correctly. And the colors and icons make it easy for our wholesalers and customer to select the correct fastener.”

According to Elizabeth Sinclair, Manager, Verticals Marketing at Seagull Scientific, the creator of Bartender, “by using good data management practices in your labeling deployment as demonstrated by Mark and the Quickscrews team, you can create enterprise-wide efficiencies that save time, resources and money. Many companies use only the design component, and thus store data in label files. By integrating BarTender with a trusted data source, any changes are easy to make in one location rather than finding, opening, updating and saving every individual label. QuickScrews has deployed BarTender very effectively.”

Quickscrews has developed a great business model; becoming the subject matter expert in a relatively narrow field. This focus makes it easy for prospects and customers to purchase the correct fasteners. By adding a great print on-demand color solution, QuickScrews can now produce labels that make their products easy to use; both their channel and end users.

If you have a large number of SKU’s and considering print on-demand color labels, contact us. We’d love to help you build a great solution like QuickScrews.

Guy Mikel

855-962-7670

info@colorlabelsolutions.com