Shrink Sleeves

A shrink sleeve is a printed tube of film that is slipped over a container and shrunk to it with heat. It follows compound curves a flat label cannot, prints all the way round with no seam to hide, and covers the whole container from shoulder to base.

The build. PVC shrink film at 45 micron, gloss, printed up to eight colours. Supplied cut and seamed to your container's roll dimension. There is no barrier and none is intended — this is decoration and tamper evidence, and the container it goes onto is what actually protects the product.

Why brands move to sleeves. A label has an edge, and an edge is where the eye stops and where the label starts lifting after a few months. A sleeve has neither. For drinks, sauces and anything in a shaped bottle, it is the difference between a container with a label on it and a container that looks designed.

Roll dimension. A sleeve is not specified by the bottle's height and width but by its roll dimension: the circumference at the widest point it has to pass over, plus the shrink allowance. Get this wrong in one direction and the sleeve will not go on; wrong in the other and it will not pull tight. Send us the container, or a full technical drawing of it. We size from the object rather than from a description, and we will ask for a sample before a first run.

Distortion. Artwork on a sleeve deforms as the film shrinks, and it shrinks unevenly — more around the neck and shoulders than around the body. Artwork must be pre-distorted so it reads correctly after shrinking. We handle that, but it means the artwork we print is not the artwork you send, and a proof on flat film will not look right. Judge the proof on the container.

Ordering. Minimum 5,000 pieces, lead time 18 working days. Tamper-evident perforation is available at the neck. Suits bottles, jars, tins, beverage cans and sauce containers.