Industry — printed packaging and tagging

Packaging and tag printing for Safety Gloves & PPE

Printed packaging for gloves and personal protective equipment carries regulatory information, not just branding. This is the sector Fotoset has printed for longest and knows in most detail.

Fotoset produces this work from one plant in Kolkata, with photography, design and artwork, colour scanning, offset printing, lamination and silkscreen printing in-house. One vendor covers the printed matter for the whole consignment, from the sewn label inside the product to the mark on the master carton.

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Image placeholderPrinted tags, labels and cartons produced for safety gloves and PPE, laid out for inspection

Printed matter for this sector has been produced at Fotoset for Juba, Prosur, Hase Safety Gloves and Delta Plus, among others.

Packaging and tagging requirements in this sector

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
Sewn satin or polyester size labels inside the cuff that remain after the packaging is removed
Master carton printing and shipping marks for the export consignment

How the work is produced

A glove header card does more work than any other tag Fotoset prints. It has to be stiff enough to carry a pair of leather gloves on a peg hook without curling, it has to hold a scannable barcode, and it has to reproduce a set of standard pictograms whose meaning changes if the characters beneath them are wrong.

The most common artwork fault Fotoset sees on incoming glove packaging files is a rasterised EN 388 or CE mark, scaled from a web image and reprinted at 72 dpi. The mark then prints soft and the performance characters lose definition. Vector artwork is requested for every standard mark, every time, and Fotoset will flag a raster mark before plate-making rather than print it.

The second common fault is the performance level string. The EN 388: 2016 mark carries abrasion, blade cut, tear and puncture levels, then the ISO 13997 cut letter, then an optional impact letter. Fotoset sets what the customer supplies and does not alter it, but the artwork is checked for missing or transposed characters and queried in writing before printing.

The user information leaflet is a separate discipline. It has a mandatory content list, it usually has to appear in several languages, and it has to fit inside a pack that may be no larger than the glove itself. Fotoset sets these on lightweight offset paper, folds them to as small as 40 x 55 mm, and counts and bands them for the packing line so the packer takes a fixed count per carton.

For welding sleeves, aprons and gauntlets the format shifts to a long header card or a full sleeve card, often with a photographic band showing the product in use. These print on 350 to 400 GSM board with gloss lamination on the printed face.

Regulatory and compliance marks that appear on this printed matter

Fotoset prints the marks the customer supplies and does not alter them. Where a mark arrives as a low-resolution raster image it is queried in writing before plate-making, because a soft or broken standard mark is a compliance problem, not a print preference.

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
BIS marking and licence number for goods sold in India
Size marking to the numbering used by the standard, and the book-and-i information symbol
Recycling and material marks on the packaging itself

Languages typically required

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.

Multi-language versions are set from the text you supply, proofed separately, and packed and marked by version so the packing line cannot mix them.

Seasonal ordering patterns

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

Stock notes

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.

Safety Gloves & PPE — working specification
Common items	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
Typical stock	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	Offset CMYK plus spot colours; silkscreen for opaque and metallic
Finishing	Lamination, die-cutting, punching, eyeletting, folding, binding
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.
Minimum order quantity	To be confirmed
Typical turnaround	To be confirmed
Artwork accepted	PDF, AI, EPS, CDR, JPG, PNG

Product combinations

Printed items produced for Safety Gloves & PPE

Other sectors