24 March 2014

Targeting pharmaceutical labels market

Six years ago Bob Veitch, managing director of CV Labels in Irvine, Scotland, decided to change his company’s direction dramatically. The business became the only label company in Scotland to achieve the PS9000 pharmaceutical packaging quality certification with the help of a new MIS program. The business moved to focus on pharmaceutical and medical customers. In those six years, CV Labels has doubled its annual sales to almost GBP £2million (USD $3.3m), and has just completed an expansion of its factory, doubling the floor space to 14,000 square feet (1,300 sqm).

In 1989 Veitch left his position as technical production manager at Ayrshire Labels with the intention of starting CV Labels. The two-man business struggled through its first year and then grew slowly until 1997, when they moved into the current premises in Irvine. By this time the company was running a Comco Cadet, a Comco Captain, Domino Inkjet, a plain label die-cutter and a slitter rewinder. CV Labels got a UL manufacturing license in 1998 and began servicing the burgeoning electronics market in Ayrshire.

‘Electronics was big in the area at the time,’ explains Veitch. ‘All of the major companies were based here – Seagate, HP, Compaq it was a real hotspot. It was a great market for us and we got a lot of business from it, but by the mid-2000s it was all moving abroad to Eastern Europe and Asia. Demand was nose-diving. We always did a little work in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, so we knew that it was nice work and would be a good thing to look into to. The demise of the local electronics industry meant that we looked into it far more seriously.'