founding and mission

Growing up in the early 1990s my grandfather built a huge garage on his farmhouse property and filled it with old newspaper presses to print his own Bibles. While playing hide and seek and climbing around on his old Heidelbergs I was fascinated by the equipment but never dreamed I would be a part of the industry. Fast forward to the early 2000s I was looking for a job while attending college and found one with a label printing shop in El Dorado Hills, California. Watching the modern narrow web machines brought back memories of my grandfather’s shop and reignited my fascination with the machines. Before long, I was trained to operate a press and threw myself into the technology of flexographic printing while finishing school.

It was not long before I started noticing serious needs in the industry. The world of tag and label printing was filled with rapidly advancing technology and efficiencies that helped newer shops gain a competitive edge, but embossing technology seemed to be lagging. While plate and ink technology advanced quickly most customers, even in the higher-end wine market, had to settle for single level embossing made with flimsy photopolymer plates mounted to steel anvil rollers with double sided tape. The alternative was outrageously expensive brass cylinders hard mounted to equally expensive supporting tooling. There had to be a better way.

After years of struggling with existing products, Rotary or Die Inc was founded in late 2013 with the simple mission of filling the massive void in rotary embossing solutions between cheap, failure-prone photopolymer plates, and precise but expensive brass and steel dies. Enter Duraboss– the rotary solution made from affordable but long lasting machinable plastic.

Duraboss dies consist of interchangeable, affordable, quick-change plastic sleeves that precisely mount over our proprietary hardware and allow you to leverage the increased line speed, rapid make-ready, and precise fit of rotary tooling at a cost your customers will love.