Lightning Labels Blog

Some Great Labels from The Bubble Roome

If you are interested in label and package design you really should read The Dieline, the leading package design blog. Every day they feature a number of wonderfully designed product packaging. This morning, I was reading their latest entry and I was delighted to see the products from one of our customers, The Bubble Roome, featured.

David Johnston is the founder of this bath and body products company based in Brooklyn, NY. He has an advantage over many of his competitors in that he has a background in design. He has designed all the labels himself and he has done an excellent job. Here is what he has to say about his unique label designs:

I wanted to base the design concepts on turn-of-the-century apothecary labels, but knew that that wouldn't be enough ... I also wanted to add the use of pattern and color that the Victorian's used and their delicate and intricate type design. But I didn't want this to look too retro, I wanted it to be updated, to reference the 1900's without creating something too reverential or precious ... The label placed on the look of The Bubble Roome? Neo-Victorian.

We love printing labels like these. With bright colors and fine details, they really show off the quality of our HP-Indigo digital label printing presses. High quality design combined with high quality label printing gives any product the best possible advantage on the retail shelf.

13 Product Label Design Tips

I have been a big fan of MarketingSherpa for many years now. They are specialists in tracking what actually works in all aspects of marketing and they produce interesting articles and case studies on a regular basis. So, when a couple of months ago they asked me to do an interview on label design I jumped at the chance.

The title of the article is Label Design Primer: 13 Tips to Help Your Product Get Noticed on Store Shelves, and you can read the full article here. But you need to be quick, it is only available to everyone for the next week (until July 8th). After that you will have to register at MarketingSherpa before you can read the entire article.

Regular readers of this blog and our newsletter will recognize some of the points here. Basically, I talked about what you need to do to get your label to stand out from the crowd. While there are no hard and fast rules that guarantee your labels will get noticed, by following these tips you will be doing a better job than most of your competition.

Easily Readable Serial Numbers

I was catching up on my blog reading over this past weekend and came across another interesting post from Seth Godin from a couple of weeks ago. This one was about serial numbers. Here at Lightning Labels we print a lot of serial number labels, and in most cases you can see that little thought has gone in to the creation of these serial numbers. Godin provides a list of several things to consider when creating serial numbers.

The keys points I believe are these:

1. Break up long numbers with dashes.
2. Never run a string of more than three identical numbers in a row. 89355555232 is bound to be a problem.
3. Don't use 0 or 1 or O or I in serial numbers that combine letters and numbers. 0O1I42 is asking for trouble.
4. Print your serial number (much) larger than you need to.

If someone is calling a technical support line and they have to read a serial number there is already most likely some level of frustration. If you can make the serial number very easy to read then at least that won't make the situation worse. It is simple to do, costs almost nothing and can only help your business.

Your Packaging Should Sell Your Product

I think we would all agree that one of the primary purposes of product packaging, including the product label, is to sell your product. You can have a wonderful new product but if it has inferior packaging most likely few people will try it. The Packaging Diva, JoAnn Hines, tackles the question "How to Tell if Your Packaging Will Sell Your Product" in her latest blog post.

If you are involved in the design of your current packaging this article is a must read. Hines presents five questions you need to answer that will help determine whether your packaging will sell your product.

1. Who is your core consumer?
2. What is the competitive environment for your product packaging?
3. How does your consumer shop?
4. What is your packaging’s USP - Unique Selling Proposition?
5. What are the consumer hot buttons that your packaging must reflect?

Thinking about these questions will help you analyze your product's packaging. Whether you are just getting started with your packaging, or have an established product, it is always useful to consider the impact your packaging is having on your current and potential customers.

Judging a Wine by its Label

A couple of weeks ago, Mike Carter reported on his Serious About Wine blog about a new study that was published last month in the Journal of Marketing.  Titled "Holistic Package Design and Consumer Brand Impressions", the main finding of the study is that yes, we do in fact judge a wine (and many other products) by its label.

Many studies have been done that have emphasized the importance of the label and packaging in wine and any other retail products, but this study went a step further. It tried to get answers to exactly how we are judging the packaging, and what factors are influencing our judgments.

The authors of the study, two marketing professors (one from Oregon and one from Germany), photographed 160 wine bottles. Then they showed these photos to 125 graphic designers to analyze the aesthetic attributes of each bottle. They sorted the designs into five primary design types: massive (or bold), contrasting, natural, delicate and nondescript. Then they showed the bottles to 268 consumers in Oregon, asking 15 questions about each bottle's brand personality. Not limiting the study to just wine, the researchers repeated the analysis with photos of 120 fragrance bottles.

The results of the study will assist brand managers in selecting or modifying package and label design for achieving desired consumer responses to their products. For example, the label pictured here for Wine by Joe is categorized as a massive design, and people found these designs eye-catching but they expected the product to be lacking in sophistication and to be less expensive.

If you are interested in learning more about this study you can read the full report here.

Custom Labels for Frozen Products

We get many calls from people who want to put labels on their ice cream or some other kind of frozen product. What kind of material can stand up to the harsh conditions inside a freezer? Well the good news is that our standard White BOPP material is up to the task. The adhesive on this material is good down to -20 degrees which means it should be fine inside most commercial freezers. The minimum temperature that you can safely apply this label is 23 degrees, so unless you have a labeling machine deep inside your freezer, it will work fine. This material is also designed to withstand the water and ice condensation that could occur on the container.

With the standard adhesives available today you simply don't have to worry about your labels sticking whatever kind of frozen product you have. Here at Lightning Labels we have plenty of customers who apply their labels to ice cream, frozen yogurt, meat, bread and many other products that spend most of their life in the freezer.

Thinking More Deeply About Type

This morning, Seth Godin wrote this provocative post on his blog. It is about type and typestyle, and it is mainly geared at people designing brochures, presentations and other type heavy pursuits. But this certainly got me thinking about type and product labels.

Virtually ever product label we print here at Lightning Labels has some type. Many labels have a lot of type: ingredient lists, nutrition facts and other product information, and I wonder how much thought goes into the design of this type. Spend two minutes to read the PDF tips Godin created and you will achieve better looking labels.

We work with many professional designers, but the vast majority of the label artwork we see here is the do-it-yourself kind. Sometimes the difference is obvious. So heed tip #1 - if you want professional results hire a professional. We have an in-house designer here, but we are just as happy to work with any professional graphic designer. The bottom line is you only have to pay for the design once, and you can use the same design for months or years worth of product labels.

Of course, you may have some talent for graphic design and be able to produce excellent looking artwork. Either way, I encourage you to take a look at the type on your labels and make it an integral part of your label design, not just an afterthought.

Beating the Product Counterfeiters

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when it comes to business, imitation can be a huge problem. Last month Inc.com featured an article on counterfeiting and the impact on the US economy. Product piracy has affected many industries such as software, airplane parts, fashion, music and pharmaceutical drugs to the tune of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year. Some individual companies have had to lay off workers because of the lost business due to counterfeiting.

So how does a company fight back? The best place to start is with your own packaging. For years companies have used holographic labels on their products but with today's digital printing technology there is a much better way. HP in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry have developed a system that can put a unique identifying color barcode on every product item - they call this "item level serialization" where every item in batch has a unique barcode. These color barcodes can contain large amounts of information that are virtually impossible to duplicate. In a 1" square you can encode 700 characters worth of information, which is roughly the length of this paragraph. The beauty about this system is that with a scan of the label you can know exactly what day the product was bottled, where it was bottled and how it was distributed. This can also help with product recalls.

So that is the sophisticated way to fight counterfeiters and implementing this system will be effective but also cost upwards of $100,000. Now, most businesses don't have that much money to address counterfeiting. There is a much simpler approach that just involves using Excel, a simple barcode and leveraging the power of digital label printing.

Here is an example of how this can work. Say you have product run of 5,000 and so you want to order 5,000 product labels. Use the RAND() function in Excel to create 5,000 random numbers. You can multiply this random number by, say, 1,000,000,000, so you can create a list of 5,000 random numbers between 1 and 999,999,999. You can then encode these random numbers with a simple barcode such as Code 128. Then allocate a small space on your label for this barcode, making sure you separate it from your UPC code (you can read more about barcodes here). With digital label printing we can print a different barcode, encoding your random number, on every one of your 5,000 labels. Now, if you see your products in a retail store and you suspect they might be counterfeit you can simply scan some of the barcodes and compare the numbers to the random numbers on your spreadsheet. The numbers should all be different and should all match numbers on your spreadsheet. If not, then you have a counterfeit product.

If all this sounds too complicated then don't worry, here at Lightning Labels we will be happy to do the hard work for you.

A Unique Case of Red Wine

At first glance the photo above is nothing unusual - a picture of a dozen bottles of red wine. But if you look at the labels you will see that each label has a slightly different design. These labels are the brainchild of Jeffrey Caldeway, a leading wine label designer in Napa, CA, who created these unique labels for St. Francis Winery's new wine called simply "RED".

RED is a reasonably priced wine aimed at the younger market, so Caldewey decided to do something completely different in order to catch their attention. He created 12 different red paint spatter pattern images for each of the 12 bottles in the case. So on the shelf in the liquor store customers will see different patterns on each bottle. To ensure that there were always 12 different labels in a case these labels had to be printed sequentially and then repeated down the roll so they could be applied to the bottles with their label applicator.

The only way to do this was through digital label printing. Now, to be clear Lightning Labels did not print these labels, but it is such an interesting use of variable image printing that I wanted to mention it here. It is a great example of leveraging digital label printing to enhance a brand. The overall design stays consistent, just one component of the label changes to give each label a unique look. When RED was launched it was ground breaking for the wine industry - no one had done anything like it before.

This is just one idea that you can use to create a truly unique label for your products. In the last issue of our newsletter, the Lightning Flash, I wrote about five product label ideas that can help you break through the clutter at the retail store. With digital label printing there are so many new opportunities for label and packaging designers that simply were not available a decade ago. Forward thinking companies like St. Francis Winery can really differentiate themselves by being one the first companies to leverage this new technology.

Video Profile of Lightning Labels

A few weeks ago HP came by our offices to do some filming in order to produce a short video featuring Lightning Labels and our digital label printing presses, the HP-Indigo WS4500. After six hours of filming the result is this five minute video below. Even though the intention here for HP is definitely to promote its presses, the resulting video is more informational than promotional. Hope you like it as much as we do.

Scanning a Barcode With a Cell Phone

As you might have heard Google wants to get into the mobile phone business. Instead of writing all the applications themselves, in typical Google fashion they are having a competition called the Android Developer Challenge and awarding $10 million to developers. One of the winners in the first round is Jeffrey Sharkey, a graduate student at Montana State University, who developed an application that can scan barcodes with the camera on your cell phone.

Of course, it does more than just scan a barcode. His software actually analyzes the barcode to determine the UPC or ISBN numbers and then using the internet connection on the cell phone it looks up a database to give you more information. For example, a scan of the UPC code on a music CD (pictured above) returns information about this CD. You get reviews on Amazon, a list of the tracks on the CD, and most importantly a list of places selling the CDs including prices. It searches both online stores as well as brick and mortar stores near your location.

Right now this software only works for CDs, DVDs, and books, but it will only be a matter of time before this spreads to all retail products with a UPC code. Imagine you are about to buy a nice $25 bottle of wine from your local liquor store, but you are not sure whether you are getting the best value. A quick photo of the barcode and within a few seconds you will have a list of all the places near you, as well as online, that have this same wine available and the prices they are charging.

I thought this technology might be ten years away or more, but after seeing this new application it will probably be less than five years when the above scenario becomes reality.

Are Your Product Labels Easily Readable?

I have spent several hours a day for the past 25 years staring at a computer screen. So, like many people my age, I have to wear glasses to read. However, I don't need them to drive, so when I am out and about on a weekend I often find myself at the supermarket without my reading glasses. Most of the time I browse the aisles with no problems and find what I need.

But if a product is going to catch my eye when I don't have my reading glasses the product label had better be easy to read. All the important information such as brand, flavor and the product tag line should be featured prominently. There is no hard and fast rule here, but the larger you make the type the more people will be able to read your labels. And with the youngest baby boomers now in their late 40's, designing product labels for easy readability is going to become more important.