In response to distributor requests, Visstun® has reduced the minimum order quantity to 125 pieces for its most popular products and sizes, including:
W212 & W217– 12 & 17 oz. White Plastic Cups
H912 & H917– 12 & 17 oz. Paper Hot Cups
WG12 – 12 oz. Grow Kits
And for those needing up to 50,000 cups in a hurry, standard lead time for 12-, 17-, 20-, 22- and 32-ounce cups has been restructured to ship in six days. If an even quicker order is needed for 5,000 pieces or less, one-, two-, three- and four-day rush service is also now available.
We are happy to announce a new distributor marketing tool for Visstun®. You can now personalize our end-user friendly eFliers with your information - It's as easy as 1-2-3.
Visit the link below, and:
1.) Select eFliers to personalize and download.
2.) Enter information to appear on your eFliers.
3.) Click the "Click here to build your eFliers" button.
You now have a set of custom eFliers you can email to your clients or print for presentations and mailings.
Click Here to begin
Visstun® now offers distributors the option of adding their contact information to the underside edge of the cups, effectively turning all cup orders into self-promotions. Up to two lines with 140 total characters can be printed.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (January 22, 2010) – DIGISPEC and Visstun, two of the four divisions in the Time’s Up family of companies, have combined their respective sales forces into one.
“We found that many of our customers purchased from both brands and we wanted to make our sales and customer service process as easy as possible,” said Ed Hamilton, president of DIGISPEC and Visstun. “Combining the sales forces so each customer has one dedicated sales counselor was the most effective way of making this happen.”
About Digispec & Visstun:
DIGISPEC®, the first business in the Time’s Up family of companies founded by Ed Hamilton in 1983, is a manufacturer of custom corporate mouse pads using state-of-the-art equipment and quality American-made materials. When the company purchased Minneapolis-based XJD Corp in 2002 and acquired Linden, Utah-based DataPad 2003, it became the largest mouse pad manufacturer in the promotional products industry. To date, it has produced more than 250 million mouse pads.
Time’s Up created Visstun® in 2006, launching the world’s first high-definition convolute cup. This unique, state-of-the-art technology eclipses traditional cup imprinting methods by first printing high-quality corporate images on flat polypropylene sheets and then forming them into cups on custom engineered machinery.
Both divisions have received numerous accolades. Since 2000, DIGISPEC has been honored more than 50 times by industry associations, publications and distributor companies, including receiving a Counselor Distributor Choice Award for nine consecutive years and being named by Counselor as a Best Places To Work in 2008. The line has received 11 PPAI Supplier Achievement Awards, most recently in the Offset Process category, as well as four PPAI Supplier Star Awards of Merit.
Since it’s inception, Visstun has been honored 10 times, including the 2009 Counselor Product Design Award for Drinkware, the 2009 Silver PPAI Supplier Achievement Award in the Supplier Self Promotion category and the 2010 PPAI Supplier Achievement Nominee Award in the Catalog (S1-S5) category.
DIGISPEC and Visstun, along with their sister companies CounterPoint® and AwesomeEye®, are headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada.
For more information on DIGISPEC mouse pads, visit www.digispec.com. For Visstun custom cups, visit www.visstun.com.
Specialized Technology Resources, Inc. has ensured that the facility where Visstun, Digispec and CounterPoint products are produced comply with social regulations by completing a Domestic Assessment on January 26, 2010.
Click Here to see the full report
The creative minds behind Visstun (asi/93975) knew they had something on their hands. Something unique. Something big. Something no one else was doing in the world. “We saw Visstun as a product that would create a new category in the promotional products industry,” says Paula Piano, the company’s sales director. “We got excited and went for it.”
That product? A revolutionary new color printing process for cups that produced visually stunning results (hence the name, Visstun). Equally exceptional was the company’s explosive growth during a time when other suppliers were, well, thirsty for sales. The Las Vegas-based company recorded a 922% increase in sales since it was launched in 2007, making it the fastest-growing supplier in the industry. “The creation of Visstun was a wild ride,” says Piano. “It took a lot of technical ability, and a lot of sales ability to get it out there.”
The journey for Visstun and owner Ed Hamilton, who also runs sister companies Digispec (asi/49716) and CounterPoint (asi/46767), began in 2005 when he was alerted to a company that was using a new printing process on flower pots. The possibilities were tantalizing, but making the technological leap proved to be a challenge. Visstun tinkered for two years with the process – everything from different inks and coatings to seeking a plastic that would be both dishwasher safe and could hold a printed message. Even the structure of the cups had to be altered, given that the printing method was originally intended for flower pots that weren’t meant to hold water.
Ultimately, to create the high-quality, four-color process images, Visstun first had to print them on a flat piece of plastic or paperboard and then form the cups; before, cup makers simply printed on the cup after it was created.
“It opened up a whole new window for us because we actually manufacture our cups as well as print on them,” Piano says. “We do it backwards from everybody else.”
The company also had the luxury of preparing for its launch with a dedicated sales team in place and a marketing blitz that included teaser ads, samples and a trade show promotion involving a blue velour bag that had attendees clamoring for more. Visstun also had the benefit of piggybacking onto Digispec’s dependable reputation with distributors.
Not surprisingly, distributors latched on right away to the new product. “Our first trade show,” Piano recalls, “one of the top responses was ‘Finally, it’s about time somebody did this.’”
The company says distributors have been good about producing artwork that takes advantage of the medium, but there’s also been a fair amount of education involved. “When you’re just used to putting a one- or two-color logo,” she says, “and then all of a sudden you have the capability to put a company’s entire marketing program on a cup, that’s a little bit of a mind shift.”
Success for Visstun meant continuing to get the word out. Samples – both virtual and real – have been an integral way for the supplier to reach out to distributors. Most impressively, the higher price of the cups (and their higher perceived value) still haven’t stopped sales, running counter to the notion that buyers are focused more on cost than quality. Piano and her sales team worked hard to level the playing field by trumpeting the company’s low minimums and lack of set-up fees and extra charges. “Our price is our price,” she says, as one way of positioning Visstun against its competitors.
Built to handle the surge of orders, Visstun didn’t need to adapt much over the past two years. The company did just combine its sales team with Digispec’s to simplify customers’ sales experiences by dealing with just one person across all its brands. The purchase of another machine will also bring the supplier closer to producing nearly 200 million cups per year. Visstun continues to explore other opportunities, such as new cup sizes and a plant grow kit that harkens back to the technology’s earliest days in the flower pot business.
“We actually made the cups leak again. We went backwards in technology,” Piano jokes.
These days, it’s the only thing going backward for the company.
~C.J. Mittica is a staff writer for Counselor
Featured in Counselor Magazine May publication and ASI Central - 2010 : Winners
By Anne Locascio -- Graphic Arts Online, May 1, 2009.
In a market dominated by flexo printing, Visstun Industries in Las Vegas is using lithographic printing to create high quality graphics for promotional drink cups. How do they do it without flattening the cups?
The trick is the order in which the printing is done. With flexo, cups are printed after the plastic cup has already thermoformed or injection molded. Flexo, which uses rubber or plastic relief plates, requires that artwork be created with compensation for distortion. That’s because the rubber image stretches as it curves around the cylinder. Flexo historically has limited resolution quality, though new advances in high resolution digital flexo platemaking ( such as 10-micron spot Kodak Flexcel) are arriving. With flexo, there have been limits to the amount of sports team photography that can be shown—faces might look funny, or long-view photos won’t reproduce with clarity.
Visstun sidesteps these issues by doing the printing on an offset press, at the beginning of the process, before the cups are even formed. Using fan-shaped templates—the format of unformed cups—designers create and submit artwork to Visstun intended to be printed flat. This eliminates the need for the calculations to project distortion on a rounded surface. Visstun also provides stock art and designs for customers.
Proprietary software is utilized for workflow and files are sent direct-to-plate using Screen 8800 platesetters and Fuji plates. Files are imaged at 300 dpi.
The fan-shaped blanks are printed two- to eight-up on Barrier Plus polypropylene plastic, converted on PMC-1250P machines from Paper Machinery Corp., Milwaukee, and run on any of Visstun’s offset presses: two, 6-color Heidelberg Speedmaster CD74 UV or a 20´´ KBA Genius. They typically use UV ink to create the chemistry necessary for ink to adhere to the plastic’s fine, smooth surface. The original sheet size, 23 x 29´´, is cut down based on the quantities required by customers. Substrates are either frosted or white.
Conversion to drinkability
Once run through the presses, each blank is diecut using standard die-shapes for any one of four cup sizes ranging from 12 oz. to 32 oz. Using specially engineered cup machinery, the blanks are picked up from the conveyor belt by suction and moved along to be formed into the cup shape with the side seam heat-sealed. A bottom is next placed onto each cylinder and heat-sealed into place. The final step of the process is to heat the rim and roll it to form a lip. The cup converters can make up to 165 per minute. The finished cups can then be sleeve-packaged into customer-specified quantities. Visstun requires a 250 minimum to order, and orders come in as high as the millions.
The finished product is one that is recyclable and reusable—and they are dishwasher-safe. Printing on plastic provides greater brightness than printing on paper as the ink remains on the surface of the substrate. A UV coating is applied for further durability. While the cost of the Barrier Plus substrate is more than pre-formed cups, the quality is better and creates a more durable product, says Visstun.
from the GraphicArtsOnline website
Visstun is pleased to announce a programming change to their box labels. Each box label now includes the Distributor’s Name, Company Name, Phone Number, and Email Address as the reorder contact.
There have been some interesting discussions recently on blog sites about the merits of including distributor contact information on shipping boxes. We thought it was a good idea, so we reprogrammed our label printing software to pull the contact data from our order system. By using this contact data, we were able to implement the change quickly; but, it limits the information available for the label to Contact Name, Company Name, Phone number, and Email address. Other information automatically included in the new label format is your PO number, our work order number, job name, product description, box weight, pieces per box, box count, Made in the USA logo, and “Thank you for your order!”
We feel this is a positive step to help distributors capture repeat orders and we will be interested to hear how this impacts business.
Our 2010 Catalogs are finished and we want to get them in your hands as soon as they're done. Due to the increase use of our websites for product information, we are only sending literature to those who request it. So, please let us know how many FREE 2010 Catalogs, Sales Kits and mailable Product Overview you and others in your office can use. ORDER HERE!
Visstun has expanded its plastic and paper cup offerings and increased its production capacity with the addition of a fourth Paper Machinery Corp. (PMC) 1250P cup forming machine. In addition to producing the 12-, 17-, 22- and 32-ounce cup sizes, the new machine also fabricates a 16-ounce container size and 44-ounce cup size—all at a speed of 165 cups per minute.
The installation of the new machine also improves scheduling flexibility, as all cup sizes can be run on any of the four machines. Additionally, the four machines are synchronized for the same quality production so the same cup can be made on all machines. This allows us to handle large, and small, orders efficiently and in a timely manner.
"When we launched Visstun in 2007, we began with two PMC 1250P machines," said Ed Hamilton, Visstun president. "To double our capacity in two years to more than 130 millions cups annually exceeds expectations and confirms our belief in the demand for truly unique, four color cups."
"Visstun collaborated with PMC to pioneer the development of preprinting convolute forming of plastic cups," said Jerry Meier, Vice President, Packaging of Paper Machinery Corp. "This resulted in Visstun being the very first company in the world to commercialize this special technology for the drink cup market. This was a unique blend of technology changes in printing, forming, and creation of the plastic sheet that has resulted in truly innovative products for the promotional products industry and for the cup and container industries as well."
from the Packaging Europe website
Specialized Technology Resources, Inc. has ensured Visstun products conform to applicable Prop 65 and CPSIA safety standards.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (August 28, 2009) – In the ever-changing regulatory environment in which business is done, product safety is top-of-mind in the promotional products industry. Visstun® have successfully completed third-party audits of their products and practices, which conform to applicable Prop 65 and CPSIA safety standards.
The tests were conducted by Enfield, Connecticut-based Specialized Technology Resources, Inc. (STR), a leading, independent testing and accreditation agency that provides audit services to 140 countries around the world.
All Visstun products—including plastic and paper cups as well as color changing ink and glow ink—were also found to be compliant. The line was tested for aesthetics, leakage and contamination, capacity, ink/coating adhesion, heavy metal content, FDA extraction, phthalates and microbiological contamination.
Certificates of Conformity may be viewed at www.visstun.com/safety.
“With all the recent concerns over product safety, especially for children, we have been proactive and are taking all precautions to meet Prop 65 and CPSIA guidelines,” said Ed Hamilton, DIGISPEC president. “We want to make sure we provide all necessary information to distributors so they are confident that the products they purchase from us are safe and compliant.”