This new style of hologram is printed on a polypropylene substrate, which causes a shape with depth to appear inside the film.
The labels will create a new dimension in brand differentiation for cosmetics products by allowing overlapping and even parallel images to appear on bottles and packets- a development which also has strong implications for security.
CEO Chester Anderson told CosmeticsDesign-Europe.com: “We’re the only ones in the world who are printing in three dimensions. You can have an amazing depth and you can even have a floating image, so we can create varying images either on top of each other or in parallel to each other using our printing technology, and this will give a visual depth or a visual height.”
“Providing 3-D graphics and going from 2-D to 3-D, and customers like Barcadi, for example, are proof that we are truly innovative and differentiating.”
Added value through 'wow factor'
In the increasingly competitive world of luxury packaging, excellent packaging and a 'wow factor' in shelf presence can be make or break for cosmetics brands. Effects like depth and overlapping images can produce an amazing display for consumers.
Anderson commented: “the main added value for those who are looking for increasing sales is of course presence on shelf. When fighting the store wars or the shelf wars, finding an extra innovation on shelf is very important.”
Because of how difficult they are to produce, 3-D labels can also be helpful in increasing the difficultly of counterfeiting popular brands, with the CEO stating: "if you’re looking at the brand security side, (the other major factor besides differentiation) is ensuring that your customers have an authentic product which is not a counterfeit product, which is also a big problem for many major brands.”
Holographs: a cyclic industry?
Holograms have been used on packaging for decades, but are becoming increasingly utilized for more unconventional purposes such as security and allowing ingredient details to be displayed on a bottle.
Stephane Niss, an account manager from ITW, argues that holographs tend to follow a cyclic pattern in popularity, stating: “Customers are looking for new ideas. Stand-out hologram technology tends to follow a pattern of being big for five years, then nothing.”
However, Anderson disagrees with this assessment, arguing that a new technology is now needed to allow companies to stand out on the shelf: “We know that holograms have been around since the 1970s, so they’re actually at the end, more or less, of the curve. Rather than going back and forth they’re actually dying. The reason for that is the increase of the low cost printing, so you need a new technology to distinguish yourself, like this 3-D technology.”