You’ve just been handed the responsibility of procuring durable goods labels for your company’s products. These labels will go on everything from bicycles and lawnmowers to warehouse shelving. Now what?

If you are like most procurement specialists, you’ll turn to a familiar source — the standard paper labels you already procure for your office files, shipping boxes, and envelopes. But even when laminated, these labels are designed for lightweight, interior use. They are not intended to be applied to the wide range of substrates or withstand the rigorous and often punishing conditions of the worlds of durable goods, warehouse shelving, and industrial applications.

Just think about what happens to a paper label when it is exposed to heat and humidity. Even when laminated, it is not long before that label will fade, peel, and fall off. Now think about a label that must withstand being exposed to the wind, rain, and snow; the fluctuating temperatures and humidity of a warehouse; or enduring the rigors of a manufacturing plant. Durable goods labels must withstand extreme temperatures, moisture, abrasion, chemical splashes, UV rays, humidity, and more.

Fending Off Environmental Forces of Evil

Think of a durable goods label as being like a Marvel Comics character standing alone against the attacks of evil-doers. Each evil character is hurling its most wicked weapons at the label all at once. Flames coming in from the left. Corrosive chemicals coming in from the right. Catastrophic hailstorm from above! Yet Captain Label must stand against the forces of environmental evil without a break for the life of the product.

While the comparison is intended to be lighthearted, the reality is much more serious. The durable goods label is critical to your brand. It identifies the product, provides safety and hazard warnings, and in many cases, meets your regulatory obligations. The substrate must be highly printable, and once printed, that text needs to remain crisp, clear, and legible, often at very small font sizes, for years on end.

Not only must durable goods labels withstand a host of punishing environmental conditions, but they must do so while sticking to a wide range of substrates. They might be tasked with adhering to metal, glass, plastics, or ceramic, for example, or even wood. Those surfaces might be smooth, such as the stem of an aluminum bicycle, or rough like the surface of a shipping pallet.

Built from the Ground Up

It should be clear why durable goods labels cannot be purchased from the same sources as traditional office labels. Every durable goods label is built from the ground up for a specific application.

When designing a durable goods label, you must take into consideration a variety of factors:

• What is the intended purpose of the label?
• What will the label be applied to?
• How long must the label remain adhered?
• What environmental conditions must it withstand?
• What are the risks if the label fails in some way?

Who Do You Trust?

Your brand’s reputation is on the line, not to mention the potential for legal liability in many cases. Who would you trust with this level of responsibility?

Someone with a lot of experience, that’s who. It can take years of R&D to understand how to pull together all of these requirements without the label degrading, detaching, or allowing the print to wear. Few brand owners are in a position to do that kind of testing, and that’s where BrandMark comes in. We have decades of experience under our belts. We’ve seen it all and tested most of it. No matter what substrate you need the label to adhere to, or the environmental conditions it must withstand, we’ve done the research to know what works.

BrandMark also specializes in color matching so your brand image remains consistent across all of your labels, whether they are printed with us or not. This way, when your products line up on the retail shelf, your brand is represented consistently. Better yet, bring all of your labels under our roof and take advantage of our expertise across your entire product line.

If you’ve been tasked with procuring durable goods labels, don’t sweat it. Knowing all that goes into designing a durable goods label, your job is to find the right partner to sweat those details for you. You tell us what you need. Then we draw on our decades of experience to get it right.

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