Decoration is where a stock mould stops looking like a stock mould. All five routes below are run in-house, which matters for lead time: nothing is sent out and shipped back.
The default. A printed ink layer, per colour, per position. It is the cheapest way to put a brand name or a claim on a bottle and it holds up to normal handling. The constraint is colour count — each additional colour is an additional pass, so artwork with four or five colours gets expensive fast, and photographic gradients are not achievable at all. Best for solid marks, wordmarks and simple icons.
A heated die transfers a metallic foil into the surface. This is the route for gold, silver and holographic marks, and it is the single most effective way to make a stock pack read as premium. It is priced per position rather than per unit, so it favours higher volumes. It does not do fine reverse-out detail well, and the die itself is a one-off cost.
A chemical or mechanical etch that turns clear plastic or glass into a soft, matte finish. Two reasons to use it: it lifts the perceived quality of a plain PETG or glass bottle immediately, and it partially diffuses light, which is a real (if modest) benefit for photo-sensitive fills. Frosting is applied to the whole pack, so the mark then has to be printed on top of it or left off.
A sprayed lacquer over the whole bottle. A gloss UV coat deepens colour and adds scuff resistance; a soft-touch lacquer gives the velvet hand-feel that buyers associate with premium skincare. Soft-touch is the finish that most often gets mentioned in a brief and least often survives a cost review — it is a full-surface treatment, not a logo.
Roll-fed labels, applied in line. The honest case for labelling over printing is changeover: if you expect to change copy, claims or languages, a label is a new print run instead of a new decoration setup, and it lets you run one pack across several markets. The trade-off is that a label looks like a label — on a premium pack it is a downgrade from printing, and on a curved small-diameter bottle it needs a wrap design that accounts for the distortion.
Decoration is quoted per position and is not the same line as the pack itself — send the artwork with the pack reference and both come back in one quote. Start from the packaging library; every mould page there carries the pack reference you need to quote against.
Send us the fill and we will come back with the pack, the decoration and one FOB price covering both, within 24 hours. 3134 moulds are in production — there is no tooling fee at any size.
Start a combined quote →