Reprography at Elopak: Packaging as a statement – from idea to print

Elopak's repro team turns customer designs into print-ready packaging – with a keen sense for maximum creativity within the limits of what is technically feasible.

When our customers' liquid cartons catch consumers' eyes in the supermarket, they have already gone through numerous stages of production and logistics. This includes reprography – a process that all designs undergo before printing at Elopak. A specialised team ensures that packaging ideas can be realised without compromising on quality, brand identity or environmental standards.

How Elopak's repro department works

The reprographics process at Elopak refers to all the steps required to turn a graphic design for a liquid carton into a printable format. This includes, for example, colour separation, image optimisation, layout checking, technical specifications and interaction with the printing machines. Elopak's repro department ensures that a visual concept not only looks good, but can also be reliably and cost-effectively transferred to the carton packaging.

“Our department is an important link between the graphic, creative and commercial world and print production.”

Willie Caldow, Head of Global Operations Repro Hub, Elopak

Caldow has been with Elopak for over three decades and is familiar with every design experiment and technical hurdle. What motivates him? The variety, the daily challenges and the smile when everything fits together in the end: ‘I’m most happy when we work together with customers to create a design that both fulfils their aesthetic wishes and meets the production demands of our processes.’

Repro is more than just print preparation

However, reprography is not just about technology, but also a great deal of communication. Especially at the beginning of a customer relationship, there are sometimes challenges to overcome. For example, when companies submit their designs without knowing the exact requirements of the production processes. This can lead to delays or expensive reworking. That is why Elopak must actively involves its repro team in the early design phase. This proactive approach creates clarity from the outset and saves resources in the long term.

To make it easier for customers to access the repro process, Elopak provides a comprehensive online resource in the form of its Online Design Guide. The Design Guide explains the design and technical requirements step by step – whether for layouts, colours and minimum sizes for text and lines, or image resolutions and file formats. Interested parties can also download mock-ups, checklists and templates to ensure compliance with production specifications. The advantage is obvious: correctly prepared files facilitate the design process, avoid production errors and enable high-quality results.

Cooperation across borders

Willie Caldow and his team are internationally based. The employees are based in Serbia, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Canada. At work, they access a shared system: PakTrack. This tool is much more than a project management system. It is the ‘glue’ that binds the team together, as Caldow calls it.

Daily dashboard meetings and regular cross-team coordination are a matter of course. They not only ensure the quality of the results, but also a constant transfer of knowledge within the cross-border team. ‘The repro team also includes the Systems and Methods department in Aarhus, Denmark, whose three employees represent the link to the company-wide IT system. On average, we handle around 7,500 design projects every year. These can be large design projects for entire product lines or small print changes such as a short packaging text,’ says Willie Caldow.

Sustainability starts with design

The sustainability of a liquid carton is influenced, among other things, by the quality of the reprography: print-optimised designs and optimally interlinked work processes ensure that fewer misprints occur and machines work more efficiently. In this way, the pre-press processes also contribute to Elopak's group-wide sustainability strategy, ‘Repackaging Tomorrow’.

EloChrome – a unique colour universe

One special feature is that Elopak works with its own colour system – EloChrome. The four basic colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black are supplemented by five special colours: EloViolet, EloOrange, EloGrey, EloGreen and Opaque White (Brown Board only).

The mixed colours produced with EloChrome appear clearer, brighter and more vibrant than other variants. This allows for visually superior images than those produced with standard CMYK. Willie Caldow's repro department ensures that submitted files are converted precisely to this colour palette – regardless of whether they were originally created in the CMYK or Pantone colour systems.

Different cultures, different preferences

The Repro team sees every day how companies' design preferences vary significantly depending on the region. Scandinavian customers tend to prefer minimalist, pared-back designs. In southern and eastern European markets, on the other hand, designs can be more busy. Willie Caldow and his team have developed a keen sense of which country a design is intended for. Caldow smiles: ‘I think most of our team could tell which market a design is intended for just by looking at it – without having to read a single word on the packaging.’ These cultural differences make the work exciting and place high demands on reprography, which must be flexible, sensitive and technically proficient. And it must mediate between creative vision and mechanical reality.

Explore the top customer design picks from the Elopak Reprographics Team over the past years

Conclusion 

Reprography at Elopak is much more than a technical stage in the packaging process. It is the interpretation between design and printing press, a partner to marketing, a guarantor of consistent quality and a silent engine for sustainability. The fact that all this works is mainly thanks to the repro team led by Willie Caldow, which works internationally but pursues a common goal: to showcase brands – visibly, high-quality and responsibly.