Marks & Spencer has been using a more scientific approach to managing the colour of packaging for its clothing products, and has been impressed with the results.
Trevor Hatchett, technical manager - print for General Merchandise Packaging at M&S, told PMM: “It has been an ongoing issue for M&S and became more so when we became global rather than just a UK operation. Our ability to control colour reduced when the print went offshore, and it has created this need.”
A year ago the retailer started working on a project with colour consultants Mellow Colour. The M&S General Merchandise Packaging team had highlighted disparities in the printed packaging arriving at stores from global manufacturing centres. M&S’s strategy is to print packaging at the closest point to the manufacture of the garments. Therefore, the nine global print suppliers are situated in places such as India, China and Sri Lanka. In Europe, the only print sites are in Eastern Europe.
A packaging job might be sourced from a supplier in India one month, and the same pack could then be sourced from another supplier in China the next month. The differences in colour quality between supplier and country have tended to vary considerably, causing obvious differences on store shelves.
Pioneer
M&S was introduced to Mellow Colour by one of its repro companies, Magnet Harlequin. At the time Mellow Colour’s case studies were in commercial printing. “We saw an opportunity for us within the clothing packaging arena and we were quite happy to pioneer it from a packaging perspective,” says Hatchett.
Mellow Colour was therefore called upon to engage with all of the global printers and work with them towards printing to the ISO 12647-2 standard for litho print. Since they are so widespread, there has been a good deal of variation in the ability of the print companies to print to the ISO standard.
Magnet Harlequin and another prepress supplier, Brand Images, now carry out measurement of production running sheets, and inform M&S of the results. Regular review meetings assess the colour consistency that print suppliers are achieving. All of the M&S general merchandise packaging now carries the Mellow Colour PrintSpec Strip in order to provide an ISO 12647 measurement tool, and using Mellow Colour’s PrintSpec software, a specific target reading is set for the print output, with tolerances
allowing printers to hit 80% of the target.
Demanding
Mellow Colour’s Alan Dresch says: “The Colour Quality Assurance system requirement at M&S was particularly demanding. The artwork has a high content of colour critical colours including flesh tones, and identical garments using the same packaging design are quite commonly printed on different continents, yet sit side by side on the same shelf in the M&S store, where any slight colour differences are immediately obvious. The challenge is to get acceptable ISO 12647 compliant print appearance in spite of the fact that different locally sourced inks and boards are used.
“Quality management tools and training are the keys to success. The difference between printers is not just the equipment they use, but also the systems that they have in place. Those systems involve teamwork and measurement and they have to be ongoing. There has to be a senior management commitment to continuously improve the process, or efficiency goes backwards. This is a new activity in the printing industry and if it's done well - everybody wins.”
Hatchett certainly feels that M&S is winning. He says the printers have generally been positive about the change, more so since M&S is able to point out that operating stricter working practices can be used as an effective selling tool for these printers with other clients.
'The good thing about Mellow Colour is that it is quantifiable. It’s not an exact science and we will be constantly fine tuning this, but it eliminates some of the working with proofs, standing with a 2-up against the window. It takes away some of that subjectivity,” he says.
Hatchett adds that at the moment, the technology is only being used for 4-colour work however, and there is a need for spot colours to come within the colour management scheme. “We’re still reviewing our options on that,” he says.
www.mellowcolour.com