Folding Cartons & Rigid Boxes for Safety Gloves & PPE

Why this pairing matters

Because photography, design and artwork, colour scanning, offset printing, lamination and silkscreen printing are all carried out in-house, a change to the folding cartons and rigid boxes specification does not have to be negotiated across three suppliers. One purchase order covers the finished item, delivered ready for the safety gloves and PPE packing line.

In safety gloves and PPE, 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:

• Folded header cards sized to the cuff width of the glove pair, punched for a euro hook or a round hang hole
• Hang tags carrying size, standard reference and performance levels, attached by string or plastic tack
• Retail barcode labels applied to the header or the polybag, plus carton barcodes for the outer
• A user information leaflet packed with every unit or every carton, as the standard requires

Working specification

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. Board weight is usually 300 to 400 GSM for header cards that must carry the weight of a leather glove pair without bending at the hook.

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

Board, film and finish

• 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

Lamination, die-cutting and screen work are in-house, so a specification that combines an offset base with a silkscreen opaque or metallic pass can be run without moving the job to another plant.

• 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

Marks and declarations to allow for

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 safety gloves and PPE, the content that commonly appears on this item includes:

• CE marking, reproduced at the correct proportions and never redrawn from a low-resolution image
• EN 388 pictogram with the four or six performance characters set in the correct order beneath the anvil symbol
• EN 407, EN 511, EN ISO 374 and EN 420 or EN ISO 21420 marks where the glove type requires them
• Category II and Category III declarations, with notified body number where applicable
• UKCA marking for goods entering the United Kingdom

Languages

European distribution commonly requires the user information leaflet in the official languages of the destination countries: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and the Nordic languages. Indian domestic supply commonly requires Hindi, Bengali and one or more regional scripts alongside English.

Ordering pattern

• Orders build ahead of European autumn and winter delivery windows, when cold-handling and winter-lined glove volumes rise
• Trade fair cycles create short-notice runs of catalogues, folders and sample tags
• Repeat runs are frequent and must match the previous run, sometimes printed two or three years earlier

File requirements and common faults

• 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.