Creating Custom Labels
A label of a product can market the product all on its own. Consumers may be attracted to a brightly coloured label and end up purchasing that product. A label can also be key to helping a consumer pick out your product amongst the others on the shelf if your product has a unique label.
The product labels play a vital role in increasing brand visibility, brand royalty, and brand love. But, most importantly, it can help improve market demand for any product. It’s one of the essential means of communication between the brand and the consumer. The product labelling contains very important information that is printed on the product packaging.
With these things in mind, it’s important to remember that labelling your products well can be a useful sales tool. Labels should identify, distinguish and promote your brand, bringing it to life!
We’re not marketing experts though, so I’m not going to say any more about what you should print on your labels. I will, however, give you three options for how to print your labels.
Pre-printed
The first option is to get your labels completely pre-printed. You just send your design to label manufacturers, as well as the application surface and shape of the product. They will then print your custom design onto rolls of custom-sized labels.
This is ideal in cases where you need hundreds of thousands, or even millions of labels, all with the same information and design. It makes sense to outsource purely due to capacity.
You also save on the cost of having label printing hardware on-site.
Over-printed
If you find yourself needing the same basic design but a few changes based on different products it might be best to use the overprinting method.
On an overprinted label, your brand logo is printed in full-colour, premium-quality print by a label manufacturer. A section is left blank to allow space for your variable information such as barcoding, sequential numbering, product descriptions, weight, package size and ingredients batching information.
When it comes time to print, you have a consistent label that your thermal printer can scribe variable information onto. This versatile label solution enables you to ‘overprint’ any variable information with your in-house thermal label printer at your own convenience.
We find this works well for those who need a standard colour logo or GHS hazard pictogram, but the rest of the label needs to be customisable based on what the label is used for.
This is ideal because you get the cost savings of having your labels batch-printed by professionals, but also get the flexibility of customising them with your own variable information. You also reduce the amount of label stock kept on hand, and even gives you the flexibility to print personalised or seasonal messages and eliminate leftover inventory.
Print-on-demand
Do you currently have many different types of pre-printed labels sitting in a storeroom somewhere? Did you know you could buy blank labels and print all the information in-house whenever you need it?
This is called print-on-demand and is best for when you need many small batches of very different labels. It is also perfect for situations where a batch code, expiration date, product-specific information or other variable data is required on the label—especially if you don’t have all the information ahead of time.
And even if your labels have the same design or similar, if the number of labels you’re applying is in the thousands (or less), it’s likely you can manage an in-house strategy. Custom label printing by an external company often requires you to purchase large batches of labels at one time, meaning you pay a huge fee upfront and have label stock sitting on the shelf for months or even years.
Sometimes a splash of extra colour is exactly what you need to optimise your products. Colour allows for at-a-glance identification, brand representation, or communication of product-specific information. OKI has recently released their Pro Series printers, which can provide coloured labels in-house, without compromising durability. A revolutionary in-house label printer that enables you to print your custom colour logos and designs on robust waterproof labels!
Whichever option is best for you, PrintData is able to help. We offer custom pre-printing of all sorts of labels, whatever your product is. If you want to overprint your labels we can offer you a label printer to suit or can customise your labels to be suitable for one you might already have. And if you choose to print on demand we can offer black and white or colour label printers, as well as all the consumables you’ll need. Get in touch to talk about whether it would be worth switching to another method of printing your product labels.
