Product labels are essential for everything from bottled water to packaged goods and everything in between. Businesses all over Australia depend on high-quality printed labels for their products not only to market them but also to inform customers, to remain compliant, and display due diligence.
What should you know about label printing if you’re developing a product?
Product labels are essential attracting customers to your product and to relay vital information about it. Although labels can and should be used for marketing purposes, to perhaps add your brand logo and other creative graphics or design elements, they must also contain information that is truthful, clear, and accurate in accordance with fair trading laws.
While your product may require a label disclosing certain information, this is normally just a small portion of the label’s “real estate” and there is often a lot more room to play around with in terms of design.
Printed label materials must be carefully chosen so that they last on your product as long as needed. Parcels and handmade artisanal products, for example, might be just fine with paper labels that don’t last as long. Bottled beverages or food products, however, might need vinyl or polyester labels that are far more durable and sturdy.
Label printing must be scalable to your product, so whether you’re making a dozen of a product or tens of thousands of units, you should consider label printing to meet that need.
For artisanal handmade products, you might get away with just printing your own labels at home on specialised label paper in your printer, or just making handmade labels and tying them to the product with string.
For just about everything else, however, you would greatly benefit by leaving this task to a print shop that provides label printing services in Melbourne. Medium-large scale runs of your product can generate a need for thousands or tens of thousands of printed labels, which requires equipment and time to process and is far more than a little home printer is capable of handling.
A simple little label doesn’t cost much on its own, perhaps a few pennies or a fraction of a penny. Where costs really begin to add up is when taken as a whole production run, for example. Multiply that one cheap label by a few thousand units and suddenly the cost becomes evident.
Product developers must use business mathematics to work out the cost of label printing services and to choose the most convenient and cost-effective solution for their specific needs.
Normally, this is done by looking at labels on a per unit basis and adding it to the cost of goods sold (COGS). An accountant at your company can help you with these figures, which contain the total costs going into the product such as labour, materials, and overhead.
What normally happens with label printing and many other contributors to COGS in company products is that at larger scales, costs per unit tend to go down. In other words, it tends to be cheaper to print large runs of product labels than small or medium runs. For this reason and many others, it is essential to get your product label design right and to choose a print shop that can work with your company to create the best product label for your business’ needs.
Print product labels and much more with Print on Demand.
