Located in the Bordeaux wine region of France, Imprimerie Laulan prints premium labels for many leading wine producers in the country. For the past 20 years, the company has grown its business steadily, relying on waterless offset printing and in particular, thermal waterless plates from Toray. The company’s revenue over the last two decades has tripled, and during this time its workforce has grown from 20 to 40 people.

Founded in the mid-1960s the company serves a customer base of over 100 local wine or food producers. Now in the hands of the third generation of the Laulan family, Imprimerie Laulan employs 40 people and generates 8 million euro of annual revenue. In recent years, managing director Olivier Laulan took the business one step further, by acquiring four separate label companies across France and bringing them together with Imprimerie Laulan under the Alliance Etiquettes holding company (110 employees, 24 million euro of revenue).

Choosing waterless
In the 1990s, Imprimerie Laulan saw an increasing demand for adhesive labels that gradually took over from the conventional dry labels the company produced. Also, fine papers with a special pattern or feel were also picking up and required special attention in the inking process.

“We needed to move on from our traditional letterpress units to more up-to-date technologies,” explains Olivier Laulan. The solution came with waterless offset printing. “We use a full online finishing workflow that includes varnish, double hot foil stamping and cutting,” Laulan says. “This means we need to slow down the printing cycle upstream, on our semi-rotary presses, to cope with the lower speed of the finishing units.” Conventional offset printing turned out to respond poorly to this constraint, mostly due to inking stability issues. This led Imprimerie Laulan to look into waterless printing. The company made its first investment in waterless in 1995, with Iwasaki presses and Toray thermal waterless plates.

Experience proved that selecting waterless was a winning move. “We originally chose waterless offset printing mostly for its flexibility in adjusting print speed,” explains Laulan. “The process demonstrated it fully match our expectations on this aspect, as well as provide the very high level of quality we require. We then discovered waterless printing came with a number of additional benefits. In particular, we get better inking stability that lets us run longer print jobs without having to adjust inking along the way. Also, we have faster make-ready times, which translate into less paper waste.

“Additionally, waterless limits dot gain, in comparison to conventional offset. This offers increased detail in images and graphics. It also allows for stronger inking, which is useful when printing on patterned papers. Finally, a strong and stable inking means we have no loss of inking when we need to stop a print job to change a paper reel of a hot foil stamping plate,” Laulan says.

A wise investment
Today, Imprimerie Laulan operates two 5-color Iwasaki waterless presses with inline finishing. Imprimerie Laulan remained faithful to Toray plates ever since it adopted waterless offset printing. “Today, all semi-rotary presses used for label printing are waterless,” notes Laulan. “This shows we truly made the right decision. We have also seen Toray’s plate technology evolve over time, with more robust plates that hold even longer on the press. This is particularly important when using gold or silver inks that are known to be abrasive.”


For more on Imprimerie Laulan and it’s use of waterless offset technology, check out the L&NW slideshow.