Why We Bought Our Own UV Printer

UV-printed bottles are fast becoming a staple in personalisation — and we recently installed a professional UV bottle printer of our own. In this blog we explain why we're taking that step, what we learned during testing, and how you can get started without investing yourself.

"My customer is asking for UV-printed bottles, but a UV printer of our own just isn't an option."— something we hear from print businesses more and more

From blanks to printed bottles: why we're taking this step

We've supplied bottles for years — we know the materials and coatings in our range inside out. And we watched demand for UV-printed bottles grow fast. The thing is, the printer you need for it is a serious investment — one that rarely pays off for a single print business. For us it's different: on one professional UV bottle printer we can produce for dozens of customers at once. That's exactly why we bought it — to make that growing market reachable for you, and to bring the know-how in-house ourselves.

What we learned during testing

During that test phase, two things in particular stood out that we had to master. First: the print file. UV printers work with layered TIFF files — white, colour, varnish — and that's a file type not everyone can simply prepare. Even experienced designers get stuck on it, because building a layered TIFF correctly is specialist work.

Second: printing all the way around. Printing a bottle in full — the whole bottle, with multiple layers across a curved surface — is considerably more complex than a flat panel. Alignment, overlap, layer build-up: plenty can go wrong. We put a good number of test rounds into it, and that's exactly what we've now got under control.

And then the customer questions came

While we were testing, that question kept coming in more and more. Sometimes because the investment is too big for the order numbers, sometimes because investing in new equipment simply isn't allowed or doesn't fit. But their customer's demand was real — and that's exactly what Uviqs exists for. You sell UV-printed bottles to your customer, we handle production: our printer becomes a little bit your printer too.

Designing without TIFF headaches: the designer tool

We solved that complex print file straight away. We built an online designer tool where you build your design with ease — in multiple layers, purely visually, without specialist software. The output? A ready-to-print TIFF file, exactly as the printer needs it. You don't have to do anything else for it.

Try the designer tool See how it works in under a minute.

How it works in practice

Simple and B2B, just as you know us: you order from us, we produce and deliver to you — and you deliver to your customer. Want to see the quality first? For €12.76 you get a sample, and you get that amount back on an order from 50 units. That way you can test without risk whether the result meets your standard, before you deliver it to your own customer.

Does your request go beyond bottles — large format, other products or a completely different technique? We can help there too.

To the production service What else we can produce for you.

Your customer stays your customer

Production runs through your order, and you decide what your customer sees. This service exists so you can grow on requests that don't (yet) fit your own equipment — we simply stay your supplier, and you the supplier to your customer.