Lightning Labels Blog

The Personalized Sharpie

More and more consumer products are coming out with personalized packaging, the latest I just recently stumbled across is the venerable Sharpie marker. The Sharpie people have created a very simple, easy to use web site that strikes the perfect balance between flexibility and simplicity. You can add two lines of text in a choice of 10 different fonts, and you can even add some simple clip art. You have the choice of eight different colors for your Sharpie but your personalization will be printed in black.

There is some fancy animation where you can view your personalized Sharpie but overall this is a pretty simple web site. My guess is that you could create something similar for just a few thousand dollars. And it is a great way to connect with your customers and to leverage your brand.

Any enterprising consumer products company could do the same thing. If your product has a label you could leverage the power of digital label printing and add personalization to your labels. You could do something similar to what Sharpie has done and just gather all the personalization in a spreadsheet that you can them send on to your digital printer.

Personalization is becoming more popular but there are still very few companies offering it as an option for their customers. The technology is all in place to be able to do this easily and inexpensively. Here at Lightning Labels we will be happy to help with anyone considering a personalization project for their product labels.

Personalized Beer Labels

Earlier this week there was a fascinating post about mass personalization over at the Trend Hunter magazine blog. It described 18 different products such as Nike sneakers and ladies handbags that you can personalize, but of most interest to me were the products involving personalized labels. They mentioned Heinz ketchup that I have discussed on this blog before.

What I didn't know about was the Danish brewery, Tuborg, that is offering personalized beer labels through their web site. Unfortunately I can't read Danish so I don't know exactly how it works, but from poking around their site it looks like a pretty simple process.

It is surprising to me that in the ultra-competitive beer market in this country none of the major breweries or micro-breweries have bothered trying to take advantage of this market. There is an opportunity for someone to come in and establish themselves as the "personalized beer" company. All the label printing technology is in place and with today's high quality digital label presses the labels could be photo quality. It will only be a matter of time before some enterprising brewery discovers this "untapped" market.

BusinessWeek Taking Notice of Mass Personalization

I am just back from a couple of weeks vacation in Australia. It was a very relaxing time, and I was able to catch up on a lot reading while I was away. One article that caught my eye was in the SmallBiz magazine from BusinessWeek discussing how many small businesses are using the internet to mass produce custom made products.

I have written before about the personalized packaging offerings from Heinz, Kleenex and Johnnie Walker and how these companies have set up special web sites so they could personalized their products. The BusinessWeek article featured five different companies who are also using the internet to mass produce personalized products. Unfortunately the article is not available online without a paid subscription, so I won't link to it, but I can give you my commentary on the main points of the article here.

All five of the companies featured here had simple web sites that allowed their customers to easily create their own unique and personalized product. These five companies are all small, so they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a sophisticated web site. But every one of them has said that this personalized offering is now the fastest growing segment of their business.

These five companies, like Heinz, Kleenex and Johnnie Walker, recognize that we are entering into a new era. The new generation of consumers belong to what I call the "Personalization Generation". They have grown up with the internet and the personalization that is available to them online through sites like Myspace and Facebook. They like their products to reflect their own personality and the companies that cater to these consumers by offering personalization with their products will have an advantage in the coming years.

So what to do? If you are already selling your product online, it can be a relatively simple step to offer personalized packaging of some sort. Here at Lightning Labels we can leverage our digital label printing expertise and help you get started with personalized product labels. You can start off by simply collecting names in a spreadsheet and when you are ready you can move forward to implementing personalization on your web site.

Consumer products are going to become more personalized. By starting now you will ensure you have a head start on your competitors.