Heret Printing Takes Luxury Packaging to New Heights with HP Indigo 30000 Digital Press

Heret Printing, a third-generation family-run firm, has been innovating for over 100 years. As a full-service producer of high-end packaging, Heret serves many of Israel’s leading cosmetics manufacturers, along with pharmaceuticals, food and beverage and other companies. In mid-2014, it installed the world’s first HP (Booth 1202) Indigo 30000 Digital Press, bringing packaging innovation to a whole new level.

When Heret Printing installed the world’s first HP Indigo 30000 Digital Press, it was also the company’s first foray into digital printing. Heret spent two years researching its digital options and determined to obtain capabilities that would truly set it apart. Yarden Ben-Dor, executive vice president at Heret Printing, explains: “Israel is small, and competition is tough. We want to be the only ones who can print what we print.”

In addition, Heret wanted to be able to cost effectively produce short runs. “In our market, 5,000 boxes is the average, and that’s definitely short run,” says Ben-Dor. “We work with lots of boutique manufacturers, and even the bigger companies are doing shorter runs as a way to be more competitive. They do a line of 5,000 and move on to the next thing. There’s a lot of versioning, with cosmetics boxes for the holidays and things like that.”

Since installation, Heret has been moving jobs from offset to digital. In particular, because of the huge cost of media waste with offset, Heret now prints almost all jobs on metalized and other specialty papers on its HP Indigo 30000. Premium, high-margin digital jobs account for about 20 percent of Heret’s work.

It’s not just about cost savings, but also about high-quality results. For Ahava, a premier cosmetics maker and a long-time Heret customer, Heret printed 18,000 B2-sized metalized sheets on the HP Indigo 30000. “That’s far beyond the 1,500-2,000 sheets that we had previously used as a breakeven point,” says Ben-Dor. “We went for digital because we could produce amazing quality that we couldn’t get on offset.”

With the new HP Indigo 30000, Heret is increasingly incorporating versioning, invisible barcodes and personalization. It produces actual samples that customers use for tradeshows and sales meetings instead of making do with mock-ups. “It has greatly improved how we manage customers,” says Ben-Dor. “We can now send a print to the customer to approve, saving their time and ours. Also, we have more freedom to print proofs between jobs – there’s no setup.”

In a different project that showcases how Heret is exploiting its digital capabilities to open new opportunities for customers, Heret partnered with Ahava to create 12,000 unique gift boxes for a special promotion at Israel’s largest retail pharmacy chain. Using the HP SmartStream Mosaic application, Heret created 12,000 spring-themed images – unique variations of a handful of original master designs – and printed them directly on the HP Indigo 30000 Digital Press.

The project was a trailblazer for Ahava on multiple counts: colorful design, box-by-box customization, quality, speed and sell-in. “We needed packaging that customers would associate with spring and that would make the box look like a gift,” explains Danon. “It took only a day at Heret to do the design, and – boom! – it was produced, 10 days before the deadline!”

Heret’s adoption of the HP Indigo 30000 Digital Press has been a bonus for Ahava from the outset. “We need very fast turnaround, and with digital technology, we can get faster results with more flexibility,” says Danon. “Aside from the very good print quality and giving us the customization advantage, the HP Indigo 30000 is very fast, and we can cost effectively print lower quantities, which gives us an inventory advantage.”