Folding Cartons & Rigid Boxes for Footwear

The job the print has to do

Single-vendor production is the practical reason exporters in footwear use Fotoset. Nothing is sub-contracted out for lamination or screen work, so the sheet does not travel, the schedule does not slip against another factory's queue, and one plant is accountable for the finished folding cartons and rigid boxes.

In footwear, folding cartons and rigid boxes is used for work of this kind:

• Footwear boxes, inner cartons and outer shippers
• Retail cartons for gloves, tools and hardware sets
• Gift and presentation boxes with a rigid construction
• Food and tea cartons with a food-grade board and coating

In this sector the printed set around the product usually includes the following, and Fotoset can supply all of it on one order rather than leaving the buyer to co-ordinate three suppliers:

• Printed shoe boxes and inner cartons, with size and article marking on the end panel
• Swing tags attached to the pair, carrying material, size and standard information
• Insole and sock prints carrying the brand and size
• Leather-shape swatch tags stating the upper and lining material

Stock, size and format

Size and format range: From 50 x 50 x 20 mm small cartons to shoe-box and master-carton formats. Die lines developed in-house or cut to the customer's supplied line. Boxes are usually litho-laminated E or B flute for transit strength, with 250 to 300 GSM printed faces.

Printing is by sheet-fed offset for process and spot colours, with silkscreen used where an opaque white, a metallic or a fluorescent is specified. Both processes are in the same building, so a combination job runs without moving the sheet.

• Sheet-fed offset on the printed face, with silkscreen for opaque and metallic areas
• Litho lamination to corrugated where transit strength is required
• Die-cutting, creasing, stripping and gluing

Choosing the substrate

• Grey-back and white-back duplex board 250 to 450 GSM
• Folding box board and SBS art board for retail-facing cartons
• E, B and BE flute corrugated with a litho-laminated printed face
• Chipboard 1.2 to 2.5 mm formers for rigid box construction

Finishing is carried out on the same site as printing. That includes film lamination in gloss, matt and soft-touch, spot UV, foil blocking, embossing, die-cutting, creasing, punching and eyeletting, so a folding cartons and rigid boxes order leaves as a finished item rather than as printed sheets.

• Gloss, matt and soft-touch lamination, aqueous and UV coating
• Foil blocking, embossing and spot UV on the printed face
• Straight-line and crash-lock gluing, window patching
• Flat-packed bundling in counted quantities for the packing line

Regulatory content on this item

Fotoset prints the marks and declarations supplied by the customer and does not alter them. Artwork is checked before plate-making and any mark that will not reproduce cleanly is queried in writing. For footwear, the content that commonly appears on this item includes:

• CE marking and EN ISO 20345 or EN ISO 20347 references on safety footwear
• Material pictograms for upper, lining, insole and outsole
• BIS licence marking for footwear sold in India
• Country of origin marking on the box and the carton
• Recycling marks and paper-stream instructions on the packaging

Languages

English is standard on the box; European retail commonly adds German, French, Spanish and Italian on the care sheet. Indian domestic supply adds Hindi and Bengali.

Ordering pattern

• Orders concentrate ahead of European spring and autumn ranges
• Safety footwear runs follow industrial procurement cycles and repeat through the year
• Size-set changes mid-season create short repeat runs of end-panel labels

Artwork and pre-press

• Press-ready PDF, version 1.4 or later, with 3 mm bleed on all four sides and crop marks outside the trim.
• Native Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW files accepted, with fonts converted to outlines and linked images embedded.
• Images at 300 dpi at final printed size. Line art and barcode artwork supplied as vector wherever possible.
• Colour built in CMYK. Spot colours called out by Pantone reference in the file and in the purchase order.
• Die line supplied on a separate named layer, in a spot colour set to overprint, not on the artwork layer.