Est. 1985 · Lahore

One press.
No orders.
Forty years ago.

Tur has never bought a machine to make more of what it already made. Every acquisition in forty years removed a specific limitation — something a client needed that could not yet be produced. This is that sequence.

The sequence

Forty years on press

1985

Founded · one single-colour rotary press

1986–89

Die-cutting · auto-pasting · multi-colour offset

Late 80s

Sole supplier · Levi's Pakistan

1990s

Nike · Asia-nominated vendor

2006

First flexographic line in Pakistan

2008

Hardee's approval · Franklin, Tennessee

2022

RBI certified · Tim Hortons

Late 1980s

What sole supplier actually means

Levi's Pakistan appointed Tur as its sole supplier of tags, labels and printed accessories. The word carries an obligation most vendors never face.

Sole means there is no second source. No parallel vendor absorbing a bad run, no buffer between one mistake and a stopped line. Every shipment that left Lahore was gated entirely on Tur's output — and a rejected batch was not a commercial inconvenience, it was a garment factory standing idle.

It was the education that made everything afterward possible: the habit of treating a client's deadline as a physical fact rather than a target.

PHOTO — ARCHIVE. Original late-1980s Levi's tags and back-pocket flashers from the Tur archive, laid flat on warm board, raking light. Show the age — do not clean them up. 3:4.

The problem nobody had solved

Twenty-two languages, one pass

European care labelling obliged a garment sold across the single market to carry washing and composition instructions in every language of every territory it might reach. Twenty-two of them, on one label, cut clean and folded soft.

No machine in Pakistan could do it. The available equipment cut one language block at a time — twenty-two passes, twenty-two chances to drift out of register, and a label that arrived stiff at the edges and scratched the wearer's neck.

Tur went looking. Not to a dealer's showroom in Karachi, but to Macau, where a machine existed that could cut all twenty-two in a single operation and finish the edge soft enough to sit against skin. It was found, bought, shipped and commissioned.

Then Tur showed its competitors how to do the same — including manufacturers in India, bidding for the same brands, on the same programmes.

0languages · one pass
EnglishFrançaisDeutsch ItalianoEspañolPortuguês NederlandsDanskSvenska SuomiNorskΕλληνικά PolskiČeštinaSlovenčina MagyarRomânăБългарски HrvatskiSlovenščinaEesti Latviešu

A capability kept secret earns you one decade. A capability shared builds an industry that lasts.

Tur could have held the Macau machine as a private advantage and priced accordingly. The reasoning against it has not changed: a country that can only supply one factory is not a sourcing destination. It is a risk.

PHOTO — ARCHIVE PRODUCT. A 1990s Nike-programme carton, photographed three-quarter to show structure and print together. Original piece from the archive. 4:3.

Lahore · the floor visit

The box Nike came to see

A carton specification arrived that was difficult in the ordinary way — structure, print and finish all held to tolerances most converters meet on two of the three. Tur made it. The samples went out and were approved without revision.

Then the production team asked to visit. Not to audit — to see how it had been done, because the result was better than the specification had assumed possible.

They walked the floor and saw a house that had bought its capability one limitation at a time. What began as a single carton order became a standing relationship across the region.

Archive

Forty years, in a drawer

Tur kept its work. Tags, labels, cartons and correspondence from 1985 onward sit in the archive in Lahore — the only record of its kind in Pakistani printing.

ARCHIVE 001 — earliest surviving press sheet, 1985
1985
First press sheet
ARCHIVE 002 — Levi's woven-edge tag
1988
Levi's tag
ARCHIVE 003 — back-pocket flasher
1989
Denim flasher
ARCHIVE 012 — 22-language care label, unfolded flat
1994
Care label
ARCHIVE 013 — football carton die-cut blank
1996
Saga Sports
ARCHIVE 021 — pharmaceutical roll-form label
2006
First flexo run
ARCHIVE 034 — QSR clamshell, early KFC programme
2009
QSR packaging
ARCHIVE 048 — Tim Hortons launch range
2022
RBI certified

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