Above: The Red Mill Rum label that won this year’s Pride In Print Supreme Award
The Pride In Print Supreme Award for 2024 has gone to MCC Albany for its Red Mill Rum label.
The New Zealand print community gathered in Wellington on Friday night for the annual Pride In Print Awards and the Print Training Awards.
On a near freezing capital city evening, a capacity crowd filled the Tākina Wellington Convention & Exhibition Centre for the awards celebration.
Emcee Hilary Barry kept the audience in tune with the tone of the night, telling the winners and their supporters to “celebrate loudly and celebrate proudly”.
The born-and-bred Wellingtonian who resides in Auckland. While she proclaimed her love for her home town, she also admitted that the weather had blown her horizontal at the airport.
Supreme Award Winner
Mastery of a job so complicated that other label converters turned away from it has seen MCC Albany named Supreme Award winner at this Friday’s 2024 Pride In Print Awards.
Marco Adriaanse, sales director for MCC New Zeealand, accepted the Supreme Award. He thanked the team at MCC and said, “I feel overwhelmed, to be honest. For MCC, it is recognition of decades of craftmanship. The level of technicality and innovation involved in this job goes beyond what most people understand when they look at a label.
“It is a high end product, niche and bespoke. We had a connection with the designer Ben Galbraith, who has a habit of always pushing the envelope. The customer was over the moon with the job and said we had exceeded the brief they had given us.
“Several companies had turned down the job before we accepted it. Most label converters are going to say ‘No thank you, we simply can’t do it’, because in the process of trying to remove the cut-outs, they end up ripping the label. MCC Albany is the only company, based on my knowledge, that can produce this.”
“From a business perspective, to go back and pass on this acknowledgement from industry, that this has been peer reviewed; it is massively satisfying.”
Judges impressed
Pride In Print judges said, “The Red Mill Rum label, printed two-up, featured beautifully enhanced sheets of stock run simultaneously with 23 precise dieline cut-outs apiece removed across a print run of 6500 – this job presented significant technical challenges.
“Being a self-adhesive label, the backing liner needed to remain intact for application, which eliminated the usual efficient option of ‘punching’ or ‘blowing’ out the cut-outs. After much collaboration and trialling, a cost-effective solution was found to complete the tricky removal process on the press.
“Furthermore, with the heavily-textured stock to feature large solid areas as well as fine text and lines, the job required considerable make-ready and precise application of gold foiling and high-build spot varnish. These processes needed to be mastered across three passes on two different presses.”
The Pride In Print Awards receive invaluable support from its generous patron, Fujifilm as well as the sponsors: Avery Dennison, B&F Papers, BJ Ball, Currie Group (NZ), DIC New Zealand, Kurz New Zealand, Nekkorb, Paper Source, Reproflex3, Ricoh New Zealand, Spicers NZ and UPM Raflatac.
The media sponsor is New Zealand Printer Magazine.
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