Tape Suppliers, Manufacturers, & Converters: The Major Players in the Tape Business You’re Looking For
Here are three terms that we’ve seen customers use interchangeably in the tape world:
Considering the major roles they play with regards to all things tape, it makes sense why many see them all as basically the same thing. However, they offer distinct services and describe different ways tape companies can support your business needs.
Most importantly, understanding the differences between these services helps you save time when it comes to researching solutions for your company.
What Is a Tape Manufacturer?
Tape Manufacturers are the makers of the tape itself. They create tape by coating adhesives onto thin materials, and then they sell them at high volumes on large jumbo rolls. While many manufacturers offer a handful of smaller stock roll sizes, most of their products are sold with minimum order quantities to converters and suppliers.
Like their name suggests, the biggest manufacturers in the tape industry create the adhesives and several other tape components in-house. This practice involves labs for testing and proprietary processes to ensure their products have consistent, reliable quality.
For example, one of the world’s largest tape manufacturers is 3M. They have tens of thousands of different products ranging from sandpaper to sleeping bag insulation. Yet at their trainings, they describe themselves as a coating company. Tape manufacturers coat the adhesives onto materials to create tape.
What Is a Tape Converter?
Tape Converters are the customizers of the tape industry, and also where we fit in. We take the jumbo rolls from manufacturers and customize them down into the precise solution for your application. As we go into more detail below, converters offer you several different ways to meet your specific needs. Our custom services increase your production efficiencies and save your business millions of dollars in labor costs.
Call us biased, but converters have the most fun jobs out of all the tape services available. Customers come to us with a specific issue, and we get to diagnose and solve the problem using our expertise in tape.
Have a project that a converter can help you with? Ask our team of experts for advice today!
What Is a Tape Supplier?
Tape Suppliers are the services that supply stock rolls or branded rolls of tape. Out of the three terms, supplier is the one that can be applied to both manufacturers and converters. It’s a general term for any business that provides (or supplies) your company with tape. As we go into further detail below, many converters also offer stock roll services in addition to their custom solutions for your business.
Tape Suppliers, Manufacturers, & Converters: Understanding the Tape Business You’re Looking For
Which tape service is best-suited to take on your current project?
Are you looking for a tape manufacturer?
Tape manufacturers are the ones to turn to if you need to create a liquid adhesive or glue as a part of your project. If you’re looking to develop the actual liquid adhesive or glue (as opposed to a tape solution), then working with a manufacturer makes the most sense.
For example, Nike partnered with a manufacturer to create an adhesive to coat 24-carat gold reflective material onto a pair of track shoes for a single race. It just so happened to be the race where Michael Johnson became the first man to win the gold medal twice in the 400-meter sprint. His shoes matched his medal perfectly.
Also, tape manufacturers may make the most sense for your business if you simply want extremely high volumes of jumbo rolls of tape. That said, keep reading below to see the exception to this advice.
Are you looking for a tape converter?
Do you need someone to find a tape solution to work for your application? Such a scenario is where converters shine. For example, here are a handful of custom services we offer our customers:
- Die-cutting tape into custom shapes
- Slitting tape rolls into custom widths and lengths
- Sheeting tape into sheets of custom widths and lengths
- Laminating tape onto specific materials
- Relinering tape to improve your products and processes
- Packaging and branding your products
Die-cutting: With state-of-the-art laser and rotary die-cutting machines, we can create precise shapes and sizes for your business. Our custom die-cutting abilities have saved our customers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in efficiencies and labor costs.
We can also add tabs, perforations, and scored liners to make tape easier than ever to work with.
Slitting: Low or high volume orders, we can slit rolls down to the custom widths and lengths that work best for you. Plus, our precision is truly unique in the converting industry, achieving the variances that our customers haven’t been able to find with other converters.
Sheeting: We’ve put our singular machine building skills to work in customizing a sheeter capable of measurements and efficiencies like nowhere else on the market. If you need sheets of tape, we can likely get you what you need with unbeatable prices and lead times.
Laminating: Our laminating abilities also set us apart in the tape market. We have decades of experience inventing all new tapes by laminating different tapes together. We can also laminate tapes to various thin materials (including foam), and do wide-web laminating. To tailor tape to your project, we can develop differential tapes too that have different adhesives on both sides.
Relinering: If you love the tape but need a different liner to work better, we have a lot of experience simply swapping one liner for another. As simple as this sounds, the right liner for your application can really boost your ROI in terms of efficiencies and minimizing wasted product.
Packaging: Of course, we also provide packaging and branding services to make your supply chain all the more streamlined.
Are you looking for a tape supplier?
Are you looking for a place to be your go-to supplier of tape? This could entail stock or branded rolls of tape. Or, it could also mean that you need repeat services from your converter. In this way, we as converters work with you to make sure you always have a steady supply of tape solutions to meet your production needs.
Sometimes when you need high volumes of tape, working with a converter can be the best route to take. At the very least, you should send a few quote requests to various converters just in case.
This is because manufacturers can have high minimum order quantity restrictions. So, you may need three jumbo rolls of tape, but the manufacturer will only go as low as five. Converters, however, often have jumbos on our shelves, and we sometimes can offer you great prices with lower minimum order quantities on those same jumbos.
Still unsure about which service exactly makes the most sense for your project? Feel free to contact us today, and we can get you headed in the right direction!
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