How does order quantity affect label printing cost?

Order quantity affects label printing cost primarily by spreading fixed costs, such as plate-making for flexographic printing or setup time generally, across more or fewer units, meaning per-label price typically decreases as order quantity increases, especially for flexographic printing, which has significant upfront fixed costs.

Flexographic printing involves a meaningful upfront investment in plate-making before a single label is printed, and this cost does not change based on how many labels are ultimately produced from those plates, so a run of one million labels spreads that fixed cost far more thinly per unit than a run of ten thousand labels using the identical plates and specification. This is why flexographic pricing tends to show a sharp drop in per-unit cost as volume increases, particularly once a run exceeds the volume needed to fully amortise the plate cost.

Digital printing has a much smaller fixed-cost component, since there is no plate to produce, so its cost structure is more proportional to quantity throughout the volume range, meaning the per-unit price does not drop as dramatically with increased volume the way flexographic pricing does. This is why digital tends to be more competitive at low volumes and flexographic tends to become more competitive as volume grows past a certain threshold specific to the label’s size and colour complexity. Understanding where this crossover point sits for a specific label specification is useful when deciding between the two printing methods for a given order size.