Little Rock, Ark.-based Tap Magic, a division of The Steco Corp., is a leading maker of industrial cutting fluids used by a variety of machinists and metal fabricators for drilling, tapping, and milling. Some of its most popular products come in a 4-oz rectangular high-density polyethylene bottle that, for many years, was decorated with a screen-printed label. Recently the firm switched from that method of decoration and installed a shrink sleeve labeler and shrink tunnel from Sleeve Seal plus a Sneed Coding Solutions ink-jet coder. The goals: reduce cost and gain valuable flexibility in the firm’s approach to purchasing and inventorying these bottles.
The problem with screen printing, says company president and CEO Ken Gaines, stemmed from the bottle’s rectangular shape. “It required two-color process on front and back,” says Gaines. “That meant it had to go through four passes, and that’s what made it unavoidably expensive.”
Tap Magic has found the shrink sleever to be a great solution for three different container formats. Tap Magic
So Gaines and colleagues began looking for an alternative. “We liked the rectangular bottle and didn’t want to change that,” he notes. “When we came across shrink sleeve labeling as an option, we looked first at having a vendor do the sleeving for us. Eventually the trail led to Sleeve Seal, and they were the ones who asked if we’d consider doing our own labeling in-house. It quickly became evident that this would be the way to go.”
Part of the attraction is that by installing its own shrink sleeve labeling system, the firm also solved an ongoing problem it was having on a 16-oz HDPE cylindrical bottle also in use. Tap Magic was decorating these with a pressure-sensitive paper label having a surface coating that was supposed to resist label degradation that might be caused by the oil-based products inside the containers. The problem was that once the bottles were out in the rough-and-tumble world of metal fabrication, some degradation was almost inevitable. “That meant directions for use printed on the bottle could become illegible,” says Gaines. “So now we run those bottles through the shrink sleever, too, and the sleeve label does a much better job of resisting the kind of degradation we were seeing with the coated paper label we were using. This switch brought another cost savings, since the shrink sleeve labels cost less than the paper labels we replaced.”
16-oz HDPE bottle in productionat Tap Magic: Application of a shrink sleeve on the Sleeve Seal machine. Tap Magic
Better inventory control
The other benefit brought by the new approach to bottle decoration is that because it’s all done in-house, the firm has far better control over inventory. “One of the problems with having a third party decorate your bottles is that it makes it more difficult to adjust to marketplace demand,” says Gaines. “If Product A is in greater demand one month than Product B but we have lots of labels for product B in inventory, that means we’re carrying more inventory than we need, which always represents an added cost. By labeling in-house we change quantities on demand and run whatever we need to run in any one week.”
Supplied by Spectrol, the labels are a 50-micron PETG. Most of them are reverse-printed UV Flexo, though some that come in smaller quantities are printed digitally.
Lot and date code information is printed on the labeled container by this ink-jet printer.Tap Magic
The sleeve labeling has been operational at Tap Magic since around March of 2025. Shortly after it arrived, the firm found a third container format for which it was suitable. “We’ve gone on to using sleeve labels for a package that wasn’t even on our radar initially,” says Gaines. “It’s a 12-oz grease tube we use for a lubricant we sell. Once again it lets us get away from preprinted packaging, which has all kinds of cost and inventory advantages.”
Tap Magic typically runs one shift a day five days a week, and it’s not uncommon to change several times a week from one container format going through the Sleeve Seal labeler to another. Gaines figures it takes about 30 minutes to do so. “That includes conveyor lines and guide rails and such,” he adds. ”Speaking of which, we got a lot of really great technical support from Sleeve Seal on that part of the installation, too. For example, we didn’t have a boiler to run the steam tunnel, and they helped us source that and tie our conveyor controls in with the sleever itself so the timing would be right as the bottles move from label application to shrink tunnel to ink-jet coding to discharge of finished bottles.”
In addition to the two container formats shown here, Tap Magic also uses the shrink sleeve labeler on a 12-oz tube.Tap Magic
Looking back over the whole transition, though, Gaines remains most pleased by the cost savings. “Our payback on this investment will be about two years,” he says. “So by sometime next year, the system will have paid for itself.”
