A carton press in Erode, running since 2010

How it started

Balaji Grapics began in 2010 as a small offset job-work unit in Erode, printing labels and cartons for local sweet shops and textile traders. Demand from those two trades — packaging that had to look good on a shelf and survive a delivery van — pushed the business towards mono cartons, and towards owning the machines rather than hiring them out.

Today the company runs its own plant on 15,000 sq. ft. at the SIDCO estate in Perundurai, with a 50-member team and a monthly output of about 6,00,000 cartons. Work comes from food and confectionery, textiles, pooja and devotional products, FMCG, and increasingly from pharma and electrical component packing.

Who runs it

Mr. Mohanraj, founder, still handles estimation and print approvals personally — the first sheet of every job is signed against the proof by him. Production, pre-press and dispatch are run by supervisors reporting to him.

That matters for a practical reason: when you ring about a job, you are talking to someone who has seen the sheet.

Why buyers stay

• Everything under one roof. Printing, lamination, die punching, foiling and pasting all happen at Perundurai. Nothing leaves the plant mid-job, so schedules hold and colour stays consistent from first sheet to last.
• Board is checked before it prints. Incoming board is checked for GSM, caliper and shade against the approved sample, so a bad lot is caught before it becomes a bad run.
• Repeat orders match. A retained sample from every run is kept for twelve months and used as the reference next time, rather than reprinting from memory.
• Festival deadlines are ours to keep. Foiling is in-house, so a Diwali or wedding-season range does not sit in an outside vendor's queue.