printed coffe cup sleeves

[old guard graphics]

Anyone have any advice about screen printing kraft paper coffee cup sleeves?
• are there suppliers for buying blanks?  or are they normally printed on a full sheet then die cut?

[Inkworks]

Tough to make any money printing on products that retail for pennies or less. Mostly they'd be offset printed, die-cut/creased and glued in highly automated shops. A general rule of thumb is that if people use it once and throw it out, don't bother even quoting screenprinting.

[old guard graphics]

We mainly print apparel, but have a customer who will order 2,000 - 3,000 every month if we can figure out a way to do it and make a profit. From online retailers they seem to go for 25¢ - 30¢ at that volume. We would need to work fast.

[Inkworks]

At that price you may be able to make some cash, but multi-up would definitely be the way to go. How many colors for the print? Do you die-cut in house?

Buying blanks and printing 1-up would be a tough gig I think.

Multi-up:
Pre-shear materials
Print (multi colour?)
laminate selective adhesive for forming cup sleeves
die-cut/crease
fold and form sleeve with adhesive tab.

I'd say 4,6 or maybe 8-up at a time unless you have large format equipment. Less costs of materials and labour and you might be lucky to get $0.70 - $1.10 per sheet of sleeves.

If you have to farm anything out like die-cutting, I'd probably say it'd be a tough go.