Lustrous Beacons Enchant Buyers

Besides providing stock for the cover of the December 2000 issue of Contract Pharma and for the annual report of the insurance giant John Hancock, Unifoil recently supplied holographic boards for covers of Scholastic Inc.'s popular Animorphs book series. Written by K.A. Applegate, the books complement the popular television show. Viewing the covers, with light bouncing off the title and the author's name, it's easy to see why the demand for these fantasy books soared among younger readers.

Given the schedule for this smash series—new installments hit the stores as often as once a month since the series took off—Unifoil had to send the products to the printer, Wisconsin-based Serigraph, at a fast clip. This seems to be no problem for Unifoil's vast New Jersey operation, which is keen on making further inroads into the world of book publishing. It may come as a surprise how affordable such products are. Funicelli says the cost of using UniLustre and Holographic UniLustre is only two to three times the cost of traditional papers.

Finished Foil Products

Filling orders at a fast pace is also a priority for Paterson, NJ-based Crown Roll Leaf (CRL); its officials claim to turn out more than 60 million linear feet of finished foil products per month. If you want a stock holographic pattern for your company's annual report or brochure, and don't want to spend too much, you can order CRL's trade-marked Retail Vision Pixel-Grafx stock.

For other products, such as books, you can order one of the firm's many holographic stocks or a custom hologram." That was the choice made by the children's books division of Bantam Doubleday Dell (BDD) in 1997, when it set out to launch its wildly popular Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear series.

The division had never before produced a book with a hologram on its cover, and it told the printer that before the job could move ahead, samples of the 10-pt. C1S covers had to undergo review not only by BDD, but also by filmmaker George Lucas' Lucasfilm Ltd. The covers not only met with approval, but BDD went on using CRL-supplied holographic covers for later books in the Galaxy of Fear series, for which an average print run is in the 1 million range. As with Unifoil, the cost of generating holographic covers with CRL goes down as the quantity goes up, a fortuitous fact for the publishers of the cherished Star Wars books.