Drinkware & tumblers
Powder-coated stainless, coated aluminum, and glass — cylindrical, full-wrap, full-color brand art with dishwasher and abrasion durability. The highest-volume promo decoration category.
Vertical Market · Promotional Products
Promotional & Branded Merchandise Decoration
One partner, three process tiers, the lowest total decoration cost.
Decorate a constantly changing mix of branded goods — drinkware, golf balls, hang tags, lenses and more — with zero setup, custom jigs, and extended-gamut color that hits corporate brand standards on demand.
$26B+
U.S. promotional products market
3 tiers
Pad · multi-pass · single-pass inkjet
CMYK + OGV
Extended-gamut brand color
Seconds
Digital job changeover
The promotional decoration challenge
Variety is the business — and the cost.
The U.S. promotional products industry is a ~$26-billion market (ASI / PPAI), and the part of it EPS serves is the one that actually puts the logo on the product — the decorator. A blank tumbler or pen is a commodity; the brand mark is what the customer pays for, what carries the margin, and what creates the deadline.
What’s changed is the work itself. Distributors win programs by promising full-color, personalized, fast-turn merchandise, and that pressure lands on the decorating floor as SKU proliferation, shorter runs, photographic brand logos, and one-to-one personalization. The decorators winning that work are the ones whose lines can switch jobs without stopping to be set up.
Which technology is right comes down to three variables: run length, changeover frequency, and volume. Long runs of a simple mark on a stable SKU still belong on pad. Changeover-heavy, full-color, short-run, or personalized work belongs on digital — multi-pass when flexibility leads, single-pass when high volume and constant change arrive together. EPS builds all three, so the answer is the right tool for your mix, not the one tool a vendor happens to sell.
Applications
Promotional goods EPS decorates
From drinkware to giveaways — across plastic, coated metal, glass, and silicone. Phone cases, pens, toothbrushes, notebooks: we do it all.
Pens & writing instruments
A small, tightly-registered mark on a thin barrel, in very high counts, with fast changeover between barrel colors and clients.
Phone cases & tech accessories
Flat-to-curved PC, TPU, and silicone — full-color, edge-to-edge photographic art with scratch resistance.
Toothbrushes & personal care
Low-surface-energy polypropylene handles that need matched pretreatment for a small, durable, curved mark.
Notebooks & journals
Coated board, PU "leatherette," and cloth — substrate variety inside a single program, printed or embossed.
Bags & totes
Non-woven PP, polyester, and cotton — large print areas on soft, uneven surfaces with wash and rub durability.
Tradeshow giveaways
The classic changeover problem: extreme SKU and substrate variety, short runs, and fast turnaround — hang tags, lenses, picks, coasters, openers and more.
Featured application
Any part, any color, no setup
A promotional-products decorator runs hang tags, lenses, guitar picks and envelope openers on a single fJET-24 flatbed multi-pass inkjet. No plates, no screens, no spot-ink mixing — a new job is a new file and a custom jig, and extended-gamut CMYK + OGV color hits the customer's exact brand standard straight from the file.
Zero
Plate or screen setup
CMYK + OGV
Extended-gamut color
Seconds
Between jobs
“Multi-pass inkjet earns its place when the work changes constantly. The moment you stop building plates and start sending files — and let a custom jig do the locating — setup time stops being your cost problem.”
— EPS application engineering
Case studies
Promotional decoration, proven on the line
Three EPS applications across the promotional and branded-merchandise space — flat goods, drinkware, and curved sporting goods — each engineered for flexibility, color, and production speed. (All examples anonymized.)
Case Study · Promotional · Multi-Pass Inkjet
Any Part, Any Color, No Setup: Flexible Inkjet Decoration for Promotional Goods
Hang tags, lenses, guitar picks and envelope openers on one flatbed line — no plates, custom jigs for fast load/unload, and CMYK + OGV extended-gamut color that hits corporate brand standards on demand.
Case Study · Promotional · Single-Pass Inkjet
Decorating Branded Drinkware at 1,200 Parts an Hour on the XD-360
Plastic cups, tumblers and bottles decorated in synchronized multicolor UV-LED single-pass — five-to-eight color channels in one chassis, no changeover penalty between formats. Ideal for promotional and private-label drinkware runs.
Case Study · Promotional · Single-Pass Inkjet
1,200 Golf Balls an Hour, Each One Different
Branded, tournament, and corporate-gift golf balls decorated with full variable data at production speed — robotic load, 360° print, LED-UV cure, and sorted unload in one cell. Personalization without a changeover hit.
Case Study · Promotional · Single-Pass Inkjet
One-Off Personalization at Production Speed: Custom Toothbrushes
Individually personalized toothbrushes run as a repeatable production line — custom nests, flame pre-treat, machine-vision registration, and true variable data, so every brush can be different at no tooling cost.
Case Study · Promotional · Multi-Pass Inkjet
Photographic Color, Printed Direct Onto Tall Rigid Goods
Full-color, photo-quality decoration printed directly onto rigid objects up to 19 inches tall — an extended-height flatbed (deep platen) prints CMYK in one setup, no screens, no transfers, about 6¢ of ink per image.
Case Study · Promotional · Digital Cold Foil
Cold-Foil Award Ribbons — No Dies, No Heat, No Typesetting
Hot-foil stamping replaced with digital cold foil — 5,760 finished ribbons an hour, lead time cut from two days to two hours.
Case Study · Promotional · Single-Pass Inkjet
Hands-Off From Stack to SKU: Robot-Loaded Single-Pass Decoration
A six-axis robot loads a flat part every four seconds and an automated off-load sorts finished goods by SKU — high-mix promotional decoration with no operator between the stack and the packing bench.
The right EPS platforms for promotional goods
Three process tiers, matched to your mix
Run length, changeover frequency, and volume decide which one fits — and EPS builds all three.
Automated pad printing
Long runs · simple marks · stable SKUs
The lowest cost-per-impression when the mark is small, the run is long, and the SKU mix is stable — with decades of proven durability on coated metal and plastics.
Explore pad printing →Multi-pass inkjet (fJET)
High mix · short runs · full color · zero setup
Flatbed and rotary multi-pass UV inkjet for changeover-heavy work: white + CMYK + OGV straight from a digital file, custom jigs for fast loading, and variable data — maximum flexibility with no plates.
Explore multi-pass inkjet →Single-pass inkjet (XD-360 / XD-70)
High volume + high changeover + full color
Fixed print-head arrays decorate cylindrical drinkware and golf balls (XD-360) or flat goods (XD-70) at production speed with no plates — for when volume and constant change arrive together.
Explore single-pass inkjet →
Why EPS
Built for variety, speed, and brand color
Promotional work lives or dies on flexibility and color accuracy. EPS engineers out the single biggest cost in high-mix decoration — changeover — and hits the brand color directly from file.
Total flexibility, zero setup
Digital print means a new job is a new file — no plates, screens, or clichés. Switch from one product to the next with no tooling and no lost time.
Custom jigs, built by EPS
Purpose-built jigs locate every part precisely for fast, repeatable loading — load one tray while another prints and keep the line working continuously.
Extended-gamut color (CMYK + OGV)
Orange, green, and violet channels stretch the gamut well past standard process color, so saturated corporate brand colors are hit directly from file — no spot-ink mixing.
Three process tiers, one partner
Automated pad, multi-pass inkjet, and single-pass production inkjet — EPS is printhead-agnostic and matches the right tier to your mix and run length.
Durable because it's system-matched
Ink, substrate, and pretreatment are engineered together and adhesion-tested before equipment ships — so the print survives sweat, dishwashers, UV, and years of use.
Have a promotional product to decorate?
Tell us about your product mix, your colors, and your volumes — we'll engineer the lowest-cost way to print it.