Letra Graphix has created a special place for itself. Its factory outside Ahmedabad is designed and landscaped by the architect Apurva Amin with modern workspaces surrounding a water body in which fish swims and one of the three Gallus narrow web label presses is reflected through a picture window. A vegetable garden holds one edge of a lawn whose front corner speaks with bold three dimensional typography.
Apart from intelligently integrating its factory with the environment, Letra Graphix’s work speaks foritself – about excellence and about attempting to pioneer a new level of quality and complexity for high-end labels, multilayer labels on labels and booklet labels. The customers are Hindustan Unilever, Marico, L’Oreal, Bayersdorf-Nivea, Biotique and others for their products sold in India and for products that are exported to the Middle East and Africa and other parts of the world. The awards for excellence are too many to enumerate – even the walls and showcases are running out of space for the AFTA awards over the last eight years and the FINAT awards over the last seven years. Letra Graphix is the winner of the DuPont Grand Prix and the World Label Award.
The three Gallus narrow web flexo presses at Letra Graphix – anEM280, an EM280 Servo and an EMS 340 are all very highly specified in terms of features and options in an attempt to produce labels that were never produced within the country before for multinational clients’ exports. Its use of rotary screens is unprecedented and unique in South Asia – not only does the company manufacture its rotary screens in house but it uses an extensive number of screens on the same label. Its 10-unit EMS340 is equipped with rotary screen
options for every print station. For Letra Graphix, itis quite common to run up to four screens plus two separate foils on the same label.
Even in two brief visits, one can easily recognize Letra Graphix’s deep domain knowledge in several aspects of label production — rotary screens and UV flexo printing and coatings where it uses high-end Gallus technology for soft details and sparkling textures; prepress using Kodak’s Flexcel NX; and automation in inspection using Prati’s inspection machines.
An additional area of expertise is booklet-making for which the company has imported a Prati VegaPlus booklet maker that can produce booklets up to 42 pages using hot melt adhesive. This machine, which should be running by the time you read this article, is meant
for producing booklet labels for pharma, agricultural and FMCG products. The booklet labels can be used for inserts, outserts and promotional booklets and most likely by Letra’s export
customers.
