7 Tips for Using Direct-to-Object Printing to Decorate Candle Holders

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Long associated with holidays, home decor, wellness routines, and gifting, scented candles are a fast-growing market; one that is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 6% from 2024 to 2025 globally. The USA accounts for over a quarter of the global scented candle market, with many of the best-known scented candle brands globally having originated right here.

The most popular candle format in the U.S. is the container-based or jar-based candle, which accounted for more than 58% of the market in 2023. Often preferred for safety, convenience, and suitability for home decor, they are also increasingly prized by brands and trend-savvy marketers for their longevity and customizability. And with growing demand from consumers for personalized gifts, many print-on-demand businesses are adding candles to their offerings.

One of the appeals of candle holders, beyond the purely practical, is their potential to facilitate decorative flair. They’re essentially a blank canvas, and with the right knowledge and tools, you can transform them into so much more than a vessel. Let’s take a look at how.

1. Choose the Right Vessel

Typically made from glass, metal, or ceramic, candle holders are usually crafted from heat-resistant materials to withstand high temperatures. Glass is typically the most popular material for candle holders, so that’s what we’ll be exploring here. We’ll look at the most common shape for glass candle holders, the straight-walled vessel with a thick glass base. The mason jar style and other jar shapes are also popular.

2. Where Direct-to-Object Printing Shines

Custom-decorated candle holders can be sublimated, decorated with a heat transfer, pad printed, and digitally decorated, not to mention all of the home DIY options you’ll find online. But while many of these have their merits, we’re seeing a growing number of customers, including Bottled Goose in the U.K., Charlies Candles in Belgium, and a handful of U.S.-based candle companies, turning to cylindrical direct-to-object inkjet digital printing to decorate and customize candle holders for customers.

While dye-sublimation and screen printing can result in excess waste and pad printing can limit you to a few colors, inkjet UV digital printing results in minimal waste and makes it as cost-effective to print one or two items as 300. The design options are also limitless, whether you want to produce full-color, high-resolution graphics, photorealistic images, or intricate filigree designs and text. Special effects are also possible with clever use of varnish or by varying opacity levels.

Direct-to-object digital printing is the method we’ll use in this tutorial, using the Inkcups Helix. One of the main advantages is the ability to achieve a 360-degree wrap with our design in addition to Inkcups’ patent-pending Nano Pin Curing technology, allowing for printing from the bottom of the sham (the thick portion at the base) to the top of the candle holder. Typically, the sham can be challenging to print on because UV light can reflect from the sham and cure ink on the print heads, ruining them or reducing their lifespan.

3. Consider Pretreatment and Inks

If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite beer glass has kept its vibrant colors through many uses and trips through the dishwasher, the answer is that, regardless of which print method was used to decorate it, it was almost certainly pretreated for optimal adhesion.

When printing on glass, pretreatment is essential to increasing the bonding capabilities between the ink and the glass and achieve the best possible print quality. Common pretreatment methods for glass include flame — one of the first methods to become an industry standard for printing on glass — and Pyrosil treatments, but for this candle holder, we’ll opt for flame pretreatment.

Flame treating eliminates any debris or other coatings already on the glass that may inhibit adhesion, while a high heat within the oxidation layer of the flame increases the surface energy of the glass to increase wettability. Wettability is the degree to which a liquid spreads out on the surface of a solid, and good wettability is necessary to achieve optimal adhesion. The MagiCoat Glass Pre-Treatment System has a vacuum feature that keeps products firmly in place on rotating stations while the six flaming heads work to uniformly pretreat the items. The fine mist spraying system then ensures that each item gets an even coating of water-based primer to allow for a stronger adhesion between ink and glass.

As with so many applications, the ink you need to use depends on both the method you use and the material you’re printing on. To print the pretreated glass candle holder, we used the S1 UV inkjet ink. The S1 Series inks are specially formulated for UV curing and work well for printing on glass. S1 Series inks are Prop. 65 compliant, meaning they are free of any harmful chemicals.

4. Prepare Your Artwork

To get your files ready to print, you will need artwork supplied in a vectorized file format (PDF, EPS, or TIFF). Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop are great for artwork preparation. When speccing out your design, remember to avoid low-quality JPEGs, and if you are going to print photos onto your candle holders, the image files must be high resolution (over 300dpi). Finally, if you’re going for a seamless 360-degree wrap look, your artwork will need to be seamless too.

Credit: Inkcups

5. Set Up the Machine

First, you want to change your tooling to fit the item you’re going to print, then select the artwork you’re going to use, and finally change your part settings.

The Helix is designed to minimize setup time and features a quick-change tooling fixture that adjusts to print on both straight and tapered parts. You can adjust a fixture’s angle for different tapers by saving each product’s specifications in the system’s software. You set the angle and assign a number to the product type. The Helix’s part fixture will then auto-adjust once that number is selected, allowing for a quick and easy part changeover between products. Inkcups also offers a custom tooling service where customers can send in a few of their items, and we will then create custom tooling for those items that will fit perfectly with their Helix rotary inkjet printer.

6. Print

This is where the magic happens! Beginning with the digital artwork file (vector or picture), the image is sent to the printer. Utilizing their own software, the printheads signal to each color (CMYKWW in the case of the Helix) to lay down a tiny droplet of ink in a specific order. An intense ultraviolet (UV) light then shines to instantly cure the ink, preventing droplets from spreading (or bleeding) and ensuring a sharper image. It can vary according to the artwork and the size of the candle holder in question, but the typical print time for a candle holder is 30 seconds. And of course, because the ink is instantaneously cured, the candle holder is ready to ship as soon as printing is complete.

7. Experiment with Special Effects

One of the things that many Inkcups customers love about printing on glass with the Helix is that it can achieve much more than 360-degree printing. The Helix comes equipped with CMYKWW + varnish, and by applying that varnish in creative ways you can achieve special effects, such as tone-on-tone, which mimics an embossed look by applying varnish without color, as well as contour print, which creates a 3D look by layering ink or varnish. Being clever with how you use, or don’t use, white inks can also open up special effects possibilities. Mirror print, for example, makes it possible to see the same image on the inside of a glass vessel as on the outside, while a stained glass effect is also made possible by omitting the base layer of white to allow light to shine through. This can be a particularly striking technique for candle holders!

Now that your candle holder is beautifully decorated, it’s time to light it and let your image glow!