Consumers who account for nearly a quarter of the world's population trust Kimberly-Clark products to improve hygiene, health care, and make life better. Commodity brands under Kimberly-Clark, such as Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex and Depends, have been recognized in more than 150 countries. The 133-year-old company knows that maintaining its brand image requires good color management at every stage of the packaging printing process.
"For packaging printing, Kimberly-Clark requires color consistency, predictability, repeatability and effectiveness." Pete Santkuyl, packaging printing engineer at Kimberly-Clark, said, "We need to ensure the consistency of product image quality, the predictability of proofing, and the accuracy of each printing. Repeatability, and the effectiveness of each process.” This is where X-Rite comes in at Kimberly-Clark.
design
The whole process begins with image design, at this stage, a core team of image management personnel and marketing and sales personnel begins to select colors and evaluate them on the basis of market research. Santkuyl pointed out that usually the color choice determines the entire process, for example: some logo colors are made of two or more colors overprinted, requiring color management for printing in more than four colors. In addition, some colors such as bright green and orange are difficult to reproduce. , then an accurate color coding and matching system is required.
Prepress
Once the design concept is finalized, Kimberly-Clark will work with prepress and printing partners to discuss the final image and color, define color coding and select the printing process. Some of Kimberly-Clark's packaging designs require multiple printing methods such as sheetfed, wide format, narrow web and label printing. Also, many printing plants are located in different regions, often thousands of miles away. All Kimberly-Clark's prepress and printing partners use X-Rite's ColorMaster software to communicate color standards and ink formulations among manufacturers. Easily through the Internet, this color quality control and color matching software can exchange color data between manufacturers around the world within a few seconds. The software is available in 8 languages at the same time, that is to say, the printing factory in CHINA can easily communicate with the prepress center in the United States!
Prior to the first official print run, Kimberley's print shop used a X-Rite 900 series portable spectrodensitometer to measure density and dot gain to obtain various reproduction parameters. The 900 Series can also measure spot colors, and through X-Rite Color
Master Color Master software feeds data back to Kimberly-Clark. According to Santkuyl, the printing staff especially appreciated the ease of sharing data with Kimberly-Clark within seconds. "This allows us to have real-time communication with the printing house, so that we can make the necessary adjustments while printing." Santkuyl said, "X-Rite's instruments have a good inter-stage agreement, and we have a good relationship with all printing houses. There is a great deal of confidence in the consistency of the data obtained. Now, with this effective communication, we don't have to go to the printing floor." The high return on investment achieved with X-Rite technology has been proven at Kimberly-Clark.
return
Standardizing on the X-Rite color management solution enables Kimberly-Clark to manage color more effectively and achieve higher operational efficiency:
• Precise color matching from proof to print
• Easily communicate globally using software and instruments
• Good inter-instrument agreement
• Reduced material and ink waste
• Accelerated makeready
• Accurate color data and confidence in print results
• Communicate color data more efficiently
• Custom ink formulations
"Since standardizing on X-Rite's color management solution, our work efficiency has improved a lot," said Santkuyl. "X-Rite's level of service and focus has helped us achieve our color management goals.
Points are too important for our work. "
