Schwerdtle has engineered custom hot stamping and heat transfer dies since the 1970s, when injection-molded plastic began replacing metal parts across appliances, cosmetics, automotive, and medical devices. Our silicone-bonded-to-aluminum dies are custom-matched to each part’s geometry, conduct heat up to 500°F to transfer artwork cleanly, and are engineered for long die life — reducing scrap and ensuring a consistent, high-quality impression on every part.
Companies such as cosmetics, consumer appliances, automotive, fashion, medical products and sporting goods makers use our dies for their critical plastic and leather-product marking applications.
Schwerdtle offers customized decorating tool solutions manufactured using silicone, steel, copper, brass, or magnesium. Our proprietary ‘silicone-bonded-to-metal’ bonding process provides durable, long-lasting tools that apply a crisp, clean, perfect image to your part.
For parts that are not flat, Schwerdtle will make a hot stamping die that matches the part geometry. This is usually paired with a part holding fixture that will securely hold the part during decoration and will present the area to be decorated at the optimal angle so that the deco area is parallel to the contoured die as it is mounted to the heater head on the machine.
We can help evaluate whether a part’s contour is too extreme for this approach, and recommend ways to avoid air entrapment when decorating large solid copy areas.
For bottles specifically, Schwerdtle specializes in bottle tooling called shrouds. A shroud is a two-piece fixture that fully encloses the bottle.
The bottom half of the shroud holds the bottle in place. The top half of the shroud is specially engineered with slots where the foil is fed through and a cutout for the hot stamp die above the foil.
A bottle is loaded into the bottom shroud and the top shroud descends to enclose the bottle. Air inflates the bottle, pressing the foil against the hot die and transferring the foil to the part.
For decoration that needs to align with other features — like silkscreened copy elsewhere on the bottle — the bottle is loaded into the shroud by the neck and rotated into position using an orientation lug molded into the neck or base, ensuring the hot stamp lands exactly where it needs to relative to the rest of the part’s decoration.
We can also advise on artwork placement for bottle projects — for example, moving artwork away from the curved top and bottom of the bottle, where the plastic tends to be stiffer, and evaluating how far artwork can wrap around a radiused surface before decoration quality suffers.
Yes — Schwerdtle can recommend plastic pretreatment methods, including surface treatment equipment providers, along with specialty formulated foils designed to improve adhesion, extending hot stamping to parts that wouldn’t take a clean transfer otherwise. For a deeper look at how corona and plasma pretreatment technologies actually work, see Plastics Decorating’s Q&A with Enercon’s Wilson Lee.
Standard hot stamping dies apply one color per pass. For multi-color artwork, Schwerdtle can help source the right heat transfer for your project — options range from screen-printed and gravure transfers for standard graphics, to digital transfers for short runs, to specialty transfers like Polyfuze for parts requiring maximum wear and chemical resistance. The right choice depends on your production volume, part geometry, and durability requirements.
Yes — while hot stamping tooling requires upfront investment, it’s not limited to high-volume runs. Many Schwerdtle customers run low-volume decoration by setting up a die with one artwork, running that batch, then swapping in a different die for the next design. Ad specialty products (like pens and pencils) are a common example — customers often choose hot stamping with inexpensive etched magnesium dies specifically for the shiny metallic foil look and a clean, dry process with no wet ink or cure time, even at lower volumes.
Yes — for specialized holographic and security foil applications, Schwerdtle can recommend suppliers like Crown Roll Leaf, one of the oldest foil manufacturers and a specialist in security and holographic foils.
