If you wholesale make-up and hair brushes or cosmetics, you may wish to offer your customers a personalisation service with their own branding!

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Unlike hot foil stamping which is a dry and instant printing process for printing one-off's, the pad printing process on the other hand involves using inks which thus makes this process unsuitable for printing one-off's.

The pad printing process has one major benefit over hot foil stamping in that you can print onto round or curved surfaces with ease. With hot foil stamping, the product has to be flat and pliable, however, with pad printing, it can be round, curved, convex, concave and even flat!

Basically, the pad is made from soft silicone and as it is pressed into the engraved plate, (which contains the ink), the pad picks up your design and stamps it onto your product manually.

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With pad printing, you will need to make a printing plate
(which you can do so in-house with our small plate maker). You can use any font and any basic logo. Printing inks are available in matt finish only and not metallic (as in hot foil stamping). Having said that, 'metallic' gold and silver inks are available but they do not have the high sheen as hot foil stamping foils do.

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With pad printing, you can mix ink colours  to create your own approximate shade.

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Pad Printing requires more skills than hot foil stamping but once mastered, it is a fairly simple process.

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The pad printing machine is of manual operation and does not use any electricity. The plate maker however does need to be plugged into a power supply. Plates are made from your black and white artwork and it takes around 20 to make in-house.

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