Prati Brand Guidelines: The Faenza Label Finishing Maker With Machines Named for Stars

A mechanical workshop in the Apennines.

Prati makes finishing machinery for printed labels and packaging in Faenza, in the province of Ravenna. Its own timeline begins elsewhere: in 1973, it says, Pietro Prati founded Officina Meccanica Prati — a mechanical workshop — in Marradi. A long-serving manager, interviewed on the company’s website in November 2026, described growing up with the firm “from a small mechanical workshop with eight employees.”

The move from the mountains to the plain is recorded in the trade press. In September 2019 the printing trade site World of Print described Prati as a company “originally founded in Marradi and now based in Faenza,” with headquarters in Europe and America and, by then, more than 3,000 machines installed worldwide. The company marked its 50th anniversary at Labelexpo Europe in September 2023; its own account of the evening describes a party on its 400-square-metre stand, held for customers, distributors and the people who had worked with Prati through its first fifty years. At drupa in Düsseldorf in June 2024, ME Printer reported, the company showed the DIGI COMPACT in a roll-to-stack set-up, with comments from Chiara Prati, its chief executive.

The firm moved down the valley as it grew. The company dates the inauguration of its new plant in Faenza to 2011, and it now trades as Prati S.r.l. from Faenza. ACIMGA, the Italian association of printing and converting machinery makers, lists it among its members and says it operates globally through two main offices, in Europe and Latin America.

From slitter rewinder to Digifast.

Prati’s timeline is a short history of label finishing. The company says it built its first slitter rewinder in 1980 — the machine that cuts a wide printed web into narrower reels and winds them up — and that it first exhibited at Labelexpo in 1993, with a single slitter rewinder on the stand. It dates the start of its “open concept” machines to 2005 and the building of a global sales network to 2007, and it says it installed its 2,500th machine in 2014.

Digital printing changed the work. In 2015, the company says, it launched the Digifast One, its first digital finishing platform; in 2017 it introduced Futura, an open technology platform it presents as its route to “industry 4.0” connected factories; and in 2022 it launched the DIGI compact. That platform had outside partners. World of Print reported that Prati worked closely with Screen Europe to develop the DIGIFAST one, shown in two hybrid printing-and-finishing configurations at an open house in Faenza from 11 to 13 June 2019 that drew more than 100 visitors from Italy and abroad, and that the DIGIFAST 20000 premiered there, designed for use with HP Indigo digital presses. At Labelexpo 2023 the company showed seven machines. Its own report describes the DIGIFASTone as a fully digital finishing line for materials from 12 to 350 microns thick, including self-adhesive labels, shrink sleeves and unsupported films, set up automatically without flexible dies, magnetic cylinders or anilox rollers, and the DIGIFAST20000 as designed to work with HP Indigo 200K presses, with a JetFx unit for spot varnish in register. The Saturn Omnia was presented as an all-in-one line running roll to roll, roll to sheet and roll to stack, including for wet-glue labels without new sheet-fed equipment; visitors, the report says, asked most about its new semi-rotary die-cutting option.

The company describes its work as post-print finishing, inspection, die-cutting, matrix stripping, rewinding, cutting and overprinting, for the narrow- and mid-web industries. Its product lines, as ACIMGA’s profile lists them, run from control tables and non-stop rewinders to finishing lines for digital printing, booklet labels, and in-mould and wet-glue labels.

It has spread beyond Italy. In September 2019 the company announced that its US subsidiary, Prati USA, had opened a sales and service office in Dallas, Texas, in 2018, to serve the United States and Canada, with its debut timed for Labelexpo in Chicago. World of Print reported in 2019 that the German company of the label press maker Nilpeter represented Prati in the German-speaking market. In February 2026 Prati announced a partnership with Performance Print for technical support and consultancy in the United Kingdom.

Design and documentation.

Label presses are built for converters, the printers who turn reels of paper and film into the labels on bottles, jars and cartons. A narrow-web press is usually a long inline machine: the web unwinds at one end, passes through a row of printing units, often with UV curing between them, then through foil, varnish and die-cutting stations before the finished labels are rewound as a reel at the other end.

The makers present themselves through that machinery. Their brochures and websites show the web path running from unwinder to rewinder, rows of identical printing units, die stations and close-ups of printed label reels, and they describe presses by print width, the processes a line can combine and the materials it can run, from self-adhesive paper to film and carton.

Much of the selling happens in person. Makers run demonstration halls where converters can watch a press run their own jobs: Gallus says its Experience Center in St. Gallen covers nearly 2,500 square metres and also shows partner machines, and Nilpeter listed technology centres in Denmark, the United States, Thailand, India and Brazil in 2019. Gallus asks converters who want a live demonstration to arrange it through Heidelberg’s local sales and service units.

Trade fairs set the rhythm of launches. Labelexpo, held in Brussels for Europe and in Chicago for the Americas, is where many presses are first shown: Nilpeter launched its FA-Line at Labelexpo in Brussels in 2005, according to FLEXO magazine. The makers in this guide range from family companies to subsidiaries of larger press groups, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what rests only on the company’s own word.

The Prati Galaxy.

Prati’s identity is astronomical. Its machines carry the names of planets and stars — Saturn, Jupiter, Vega and Alhena among them — and ACIMGA’s member profile explains why: the company’s technology, it says, “is based on the forces that govern movement,” so, “thinking about the perfection of the planetary system,” its machines bear the names of celestial bodies. The theme runs through its website, which calls its staff the “Prati Galaxy,” runs columns titled “Space Age Finishing” and “Solar Conversations,” and has published a set of “philosophical cards” under the same name.

Its mission line is “Partnering your growth,” and its stated vision is to be the market reference for converting and finishing the materials used to decorate and package products in the narrow- and mid-web industries. The ACIMGA profile describes a Prati machine as made in Italy, durable, complete, simple, versatile and rigorous; those are the company’s words. The company says it has held ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 certification since 2019, for quality, environmental and workplace management systems.

The company places its production in the Faenza plant it opened in 2011, and says it manages every step itself, from design and prototyping through to installation and technical support. Its figure of 2,500 machines installed by 2014 comes from its own timeline.

For a design guide, Prati shows how a machinery maker can build a whole brand language from one metaphor, the planetary system, and apply it to products, people and publications alike. Compare OMET, another Italian maker of narrow-web machinery, and Lombardi, an Italian maker of label converting machinery. For this guide we use a night-sky blue and a comet gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Prati’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.