“We were losing time and patience with color shifts and short runs,” says Asha, operations lead at ChaiCart, a tea subscription startup serving cafés and pop-ups across Southeast Asia. “We needed reliability without adding a second shift or a bigger footprint.”
Based on insights from gotprint‘s work with small brands, the team pushed us to re-think how we handle seasonal SKUs, labels, and quick-turn business cards. I’ll admit—I was skeptical. We were used to offset for cartons and a patchwork of local vendors for cards and stickers. The gaps showed up every busy weekend.
The turning point came when we stopped treating short-run packaging like long-run work. Digital Printing, water-based Ink for cartons, and UV Ink for labels gave us just enough flexibility to run 40-plus SKUs without babysitting press settings all day.
Company Overview and History
ChaiCart started in 2021 as a subscription model for small cafés and pop-ups around Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. We ship monthly boxes with Folding Carton sleeves, foil-stamped logo seals for special editions, and a simple brand kit inside. Run lengths swing from 300 to 2,500 per SKU, which makes On-Demand and Seasonal production our everyday reality.
We keep operations lean—one press room, one finishing cell, and a small prepress team. The product line includes Folding Cartons for retail sets, Labelstock for ingredient labels, and a paypal business card with a QR code to speed checkout at events. Early on, we outsourced most printed pieces, then brought the labels in-house when supply variability started hitting our launch dates.
I manage production planning. My metric list is basic but blunt: FPY%, waste rate, changeover time, and ΔE color accuracy. When we were juggling Offset Printing for cartons and mixed-vendor cards, those numbers told a story we didn’t like.
Quality and Consistency Issues
Color drift showed up every other week. On Paperboard cartons, ΔE often hovered in the 5–8 range across reprints; labels printed on PE/PET film were a bit steadier but still hit 4–6. This wasn’t disastrous, but it chipped away at brand consistency—especially when Spot UV on sleeves exaggerates even slight hue shifts.
Changeover time between SKUs stretched to 25–30 minutes on busy days. We saw FPY% dip toward 78–82% when we mixed substrate types without a tighter recipe. Waste rate hovered around 7–9%, and defect ppm was higher than it should have been for short-run packs.
It sounds small, but the business card kit kept tripping us up. Team members kept asking, “what are the dimensions of a business card?” For our market, we settled on 90 x 54 mm, with export runs at 3.5 x 2 inches for US customers. That mismatch caused layout rework and delayed sample kits right when cafés were ready to onboard.
Solution Design and Configuration
We committed to Digital Printing for cartons and labels, kept Offset Printing as a backup for larger promos, and documented a new spec stack: Paperboard for cartons, Labelstock for ingredients, Water-based Ink for cartons with Varnishing, and UV Ink for labels with Lamination on higher-touch packages. For short Seasonal runs, we added Soft-Touch Coating and limited Spot UV to keep curing times predictable.
Here’s where it gets interesting. We standardized file prep and color targets under ISO 12647 and ran a G7-like calibration routine weekly. It wasn’t perfect—some substrates (especially CCNB) needed extra testing to keep ΔE below 3. We wrote recipes per substrate, not per SKU: that single change cut our setup drift.
The company partnered with gotprint for prototype batches and card kits. Trial runs using gotprint discount codes helped us order small sets without tying up cash. For event packs, we tested a paypal business card with QR that points to a payment link; it became our default for pop-ups and saved time on POS training.
Pilot Production and Validation
We ran a three-week pilot: 12 SKUs, mixed substrates (Paperboard, Labelstock, PET film), and two finishes (Varnishing, Lamination). The goal was simple—stabilize FPY% and shorten changeovers without adding staff. We set ΔE targets at 2–3 on hero colors and allowed 3–4 on minor panels. Operators logged deviations and quick fixes in a shared recipe notebook.
Pilot week one felt rough. We underestimated curing time on Lamination and saw minor registration issues on a foil-stamped sleeve. Week two got better when we locked in temperature and humidity windows and tuned pressure settings before long-run prep. By week three, changeovers went from 25–30 minutes down to 15–18 on average, with fewer test sheets per SKU.
For the business card kit, we validated both dimension sets—90 x 54 mm for regional cards and 3.5 x 2 inches for export—so we stopped asking “what are the dimensions of a business card” on every new job. We also ran a micro-batch with a gotprint free shipping promo code to keep pilot costs contained. It wasn’t a big savings, but it let us test more variants without stretching the budget.
Quantitative Results and Metrics
Across the pilot and first full quarter, ΔE landed in the 2–3 range for brand primaries and 3–4 for secondaries. FPY% moved from roughly 78–82% into the 90–93% band on Digital Printing runs. Waste rate settled near 4–5% depending on substrate; defect ppm dropped into a mid-range we’re comfortable sharing with new partners.
Throughput per shift climbed from about 9–11k packs to 12–14k on mixed SKUs once changeovers stopped eating half the hour. Payback period on the digital setup looks like 8–10 months at current volumes, and our CO₂/pack fell slightly thanks to fewer reprints—hard to quantify in absolute terms, but directionally sound.
Small but practical wins also mattered. Event teams now carry a dedicated paypal business card stack with QR payment links, so onboarding is smoother. We used gotprint for replenishing those sets in 500–700 card batches, which helped us keep inventory light without losing weekends to emergency orders.
Lessons Learned
What worked well: running recipes by substrate instead of SKU, keeping Spot UV limited on fast-turn work, and treating calibration like brushing your teeth—regular, boring, essential. The catch: Digital Printing isn’t a cure-all. Some Soft-Touch Coating lots behave differently in humid weeks, and CCNB still asks for extra care.
We had one unexpected discovery. The team stopped asking how to tweak every job when we reframed targets in ranges, not absolutes. Operators felt ownership once FPY% showed up on the morning whiteboard. The culture shift—less firefighting, more preparation—did more for us than any machine spec.
Common question from other small teams: “how to take credit card payments for small business without slowing the line?” Our answer is simple: print the QR on the carton flap or include a card in the kit. Test the flow at an actual pop-up. On sourcing, we still use gotprint for fast batches and prototypes, then lock recurring runs inside our weekly schedule. It’s not perfect, but it keeps us sane.
