Primera Brand Guidelines: The Plymouth Colour Label Printer Maker Spun Off From Fargo

A printer name before it was a company.

The Primera name came before the company. In August 1993 Fargo Electronics of Eden Prairie, Minnesota launched the Primera Color Printer, a thermal-transfer printer that printed colour from a wax-based ink ribbon worked with Windows 3.1 and TrueType fonts and printed on both A4 and letter-size paper, Telecompaper reported on 19 August 1993. Reviewing it in its September 1993 issue, the computer magazine COMPUTE! described Fargo as “a producer of bar-code printers” and explained how the Primera built its colours by printing yellow, then magenta, then cyan on top of one another, with an optional four-colour ribbon to add a true black. The reviewer noted a resolution of 203 dots per inch, found that colours came out dense and solid on smooth coated paper and acetate sheets, and saw dropouts on ordinary photocopy paper, judging the printer well suited to proofing pictures.

The company came later. Primera’s own company description, reproduced by its Slovenian distributor Gregor, says Primera Technology, Inc. was formed in February 1998 as an independent spin-off from Fargo Electronics. Fargo itself carried on as a separate business: it was bought in 2006 by HID Global, which added Fargo’s card-issuance technology to its range, according to English Wikipedia’s history of HID.

Primera has since settled in Plymouth, Minnesota, where its headquarters are today. Its website now speaks of “more than 50-year history” in designing and making specialty colour printers, and says Primera has built and sold more than 1.5 million printers worldwide. We give both figures as the company’s own claims.

Colour labels, discs, slides and cookies.

Primera’s range is broader than labels. On its website the company lists the Bravo-Series CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc publishers, which copy and print discs; the LX-Series colour label printers; the AP-Series label applicators; and the Signature printers for slides and tissue cassettes used in laboratories. It also sells supplies for its CX and FX digital presses and its Catalyst range, and it offers custom-printed labels made to order.

Primera’s website groups its label pages by the product being labelled — wine, beer and spirits, coffee and tea, candles, cosmetics, sauces and dressings, spices, specialty foods and more. Barcode labels and name badges sit in the same list, and a separate section covers healthcare and laboratory printers.

One recent product is a food printer. On 1 August 2020 Primera announced from Plymouth that Eddie, a printer that uses edible ink to print images onto cookies, white chocolate, macarons and similar foods, was shipping, according to the press release as reprinted by Santé magazine. A carousel feeder turns each cookie into position, the printer draws it in, prints it and returns it to the carousel. Out of the box it takes items of about three to three and a half inches across, and custom trays widen that range; Primera also sells a bulk frosting mix and pre-frosted sugar cookies to print on, Industry Sourcing reported. Primera describes Eddie as the first and only NSF- and GMP-certified edible ink printer, and its release said printed items are dry and ready for sale straight after printing, with images colour-matched to ICC colour standards; we give those as the company’s claims. Trade sites carried the announcement again in later years, including QSR Web in June 2024, and the trade site Industry Sourcing reported that Eddie was being shipped to markets including Southeast Asia.

The company also states some environmental commitments: it says it is registered as a WEEE producer in Europe and offers free recycling of its ink cartridges worldwide for the life of the product.

Label and receipt printers.

Label and receipt printers are rarely noticed by the people who use their output. A shipping label on a parcel, a price tag on a shelf, a wristband, a till receipt or a ticket from a self-checkout machine all come from small thermal printers that sit out of sight, and the companies that make them present themselves less as consumer brands than as suppliers to warehouses, shops, hospitals and factories.

Their catalogues follow the places where the printers work. Desktop label printers sit on packing benches and in back offices; larger industrial models run around the clock on distribution lines and print-and-apply systems; receipt printers sit at shop counters and inside kiosks; and handheld printers hang from belts and shoulder straps in delivery vans and store aisles. Alongside the machines, most makers sell the consumables that keep them running, from label rolls and wristbands to thermal transfer ribbons, as well as software for managing whole fleets of printers.

The trade meets at fairs rather than in shop windows. Makers show new models at events such as LogiMAT in Stuttgart for warehousing and logistics, the NRF retail show in New York, and EuroShop in Düsseldorf for retail equipment, where printers appear alongside scanners, mobile computers and RFID readers. Product names are mostly codes of letters and numbers, as in the ranges described in this guide.

Many of the makers have changed hands, merged or grown out of larger electronics groups, so their names often carry traces of earlier owners. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it began, who owns it now and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A European arm that took its own name.

For many years Primera’s products reached Europe through a German company. From 1 February 2019, Primera Technology Europe began trading as DTM Print, under DTM Holding GmbH in Wiesbaden, the trade magazine packaging journal reported that day. The magazine said the business had belonged to the US group Primera Technology Inc. for 18 years and had represented its specialty printers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and that label printers stayed in its portfolio. DTM itself dates from 1986, the report said, and its name stands for “Data Technology Management.” One of DTM Print’s managing directors told the magazine that since 2013 the company had been developing label-printing solutions used by manufacturers including Coca-Cola, Mars and L’Oréal.

In the United States the company still trades as Primera Technology, Inc., headquartered in Plymouth, Minnesota. It says it sells its products in more than 200 countries and territories and offers sales, support and customer service in all time zones. It describes its mission as producing “technologically superior products” with a high degree of customer satisfaction; we give that as its own wording.

For a design guide, Primera shows how a product name from 1993 became the name of a company in 1998. Compare Epson and Zebra, two other printer makers. For this guide we use a deep teal, cream and a magenta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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