The printing is important for products like Sports bottle, thermos flask and travel mug, because, they are used for promotion and branding widely, the logo and designed theme have to be well printed on the surface.  And they are products that showing individual’s personality, the printing is the key part to deliver and shows the personality.

As the professional supplier of s/s water bottle, we can put your logo, artwork well printed in our company, we want to share the knowledge on the printing methods as below.

It is the most common printing method used on the drinkware, and it is also the cheapest one, easy to conduct.

Screen printing is a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. The technique uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil

But the silkscreen printing only suitable for the solid color patterns, take one of product line for example: the 1-3 colors logo with solid color will be printed with silk screen printing. Only one color can be printed one time, repeat the process to get multi-color logo on the travel mug.

The limit is: support limited 1-3 colors and for solid color only. And it’s difficult to complicated mixed colors.

When your customer needs a vivid picture, maybe the cartoon character of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland to be printed on the surface, then you should consider the heat transfer printing.

In heat transfer printing, a design is printed in reverse on a special release paper using a plastisol-based ink. The printed image is then placed against the desired substrate and subjected to high temperature (commonly 375ºF) and pressure (60 pounds) for a short period of time. After the substrate has cooled, the release paper is peeled away and the image will have been transferred to the substrate.

The downside is the set up charge is much higher than silkscreen’s, around 500USD per design, the cost is only estimated, the actual cost depends on the size and the quantity of the colors. Around 30% of our travel mugs are printed with heat transfer printing.

If you need your logo long lasting on the surface of bottles, lasering engraved is a good choice. The logo is engraved on the s/s surface or coating surface by lasering machine, so laser engraved logo can be one color only – stainless steel background color.

There’s another limitation on lasering logo. The max width of logo should be less than 50mm due the cylinder shape of bottle.

Laser engraved logo don’t need set up charge. So it’s suitable for small batch of logo making such as hundreds piece. The labour cost of laser logo is according to the size of logo. A big logo will take more time and energy for engraving, the cost will be more expensive than small one.

It’s another way to make logo long lasting on the surface of bottles. It need a logo tooling to punch on the surface of stainless steel, then leave a emboss logo on the surface of stainless steel. It can be concaved or convex on s/s. You can feel the logo.

As emboss logo need a tooling, which cost around $400-500. So it need higher than MOQ than screen printing and lasering logo. As it’s punched on s/s surface, the logo can’t be too complicate and too big.

It’s another way to make logo long lasting on the surface of bottles. It need a logo tooling to punch on the surface of stainless steel, then leave a emboss logo on the surface of stainless steel. It can be concaved or convex on s/s. You can feel the logo.

As emboss logo need a tooling, which cost around $400-500. So it need higher than MOQ than screen printing and lasering logo. As it’s punched on s/s surface, the logo can’t be too complicate and too big.