If you are looking to new trends in bottle decoration and want your product to stand out on retail shelves, then you should explore the benefits of shrink sleeve labels. Shrink sleeves offer full bottle graphics opportunities with vivid colors on virtually any bottle shape. The packaging market has embraced shrink sleeving as it has shown to result in direct increases in product sales over other decoration methods. Products like energy drinks and single serve dairy products started the trend in the 1990’s and the market quickly learned that this new technology was a hit with customers

There are two primary methods of shrinking sleeves to bottles – convection (or dry) heat and steam heat. Convection heat is similar to your kitchen oven. While it works well with uniform containers, there is a lack of control of where the heat is focused, thus this form of shrinking may not give the desired results for uniquely-shaped containers. Dry heat produces a harsh environment for a bottle to go through, so some plastics tend to deform during the operation. Pogue Label & Screen reviewed the many shrink options on the market and chose to use steam in our operation. Steam tunnels require a significantly higher capital investment, but offer a much broader range of container application. This is due to a couple of factors, the first of which is the ability to control how the steam is applied to the container. Valves located throughout the tunnel allow the operator to direct the steam in a very precise manner, so we can control the amount of shrink directed at any location for precise shrinkage. Additionally, steam offers a “friendly” heat, which reduces bottle deformations and scrap. This is particularly important when shrinking PET and thin walled bottles. So go ahead and design a bottle that is new and crazy. Make it bilingual without worrying about label space. Satisfy all the governing body regulations with fine print. Shrink sleeves increase your print area to handle everything you need. Pogue will make sure you and your products get rave reviews!