Booths moves to in-store label production

It has used the opportunity to redesign its shelf labels and to ensure they are more in line with the brand guidelines in terms of fonts and colors.

Natalie Zamur, project manager at Booths, said: ‘The problem we had was that our shelf edge labels didn’t display any promotional information. If a product was on price promotion or not, the label looked the same. This meant that we relied exclusively on shelf talkers and other signage to communicate to customers. This was a clunky and impractical solution as the shelf talkers pinged off constantly and were too bulky to have next to every product we had on promotion at any one time.’

The final straw came when Zamur saw a member of staff laboriously tearing up perforated sheets for the shelf edge labels with dust flying everywhere. That’s when she turned to Epson.

The ColorWorks C3500 that Booths selected is a desktop inkjet color label printer with 360 nozzles per color (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). It can print up to 720 x 360dpi but at a standard 360 x 360dpi it can run at 103 mm/second.

‘The reason I picked the C3500 is that it would cut the labels as well as print them. We trialed the first one at our Longridge store for a month and from then on rolled out in phases to all stores. It was easy for us as a project team to roll out the changes but it was a gigantic undertaking for the stores who had to swap over every shelf edge label in the shop.’

Now the group has standardized with black and white product identification labels but white text on a red background for all promotions. It outputs two different sizes, an 80 x40mm for most but an 80 x 80mm double height label for wine and produce sections. It uses 80 x 50m premium matte rolls from Epson.

Most of the labels are printed in promotional changeover weeks and anything up to 1,200 new offers might be involved. On average each store is outputting 2,000 to 2,500 labels a month.

‘Our labels are very intensive on magenta ink for the promotional labels which is more expensive than just printing black on to colored paper but if fits our brand so it’s worth it,’ Zamur said. ‘Staff love the new color designs and they appreciate not being in an endless loop of picking up shelf talkers that have pinged off shelves.’