Online Labels – A buyers guide

You might be thinking of starting a new cosmetics brand or a candle label company or another type of business, one thing in common that you will require is the labels to mark your products. Buying personalised labels online can be a daunting task, especially if you’re new to label printing.

Below we will highlight some of the decisions you should be considering when ordering your labels with an online label supplier.

You’ll find that many companies that offer labels don’t actually produce them in-house, they are brokers that use print houses to facilitate their orders. An issue with this, which was one of the reasons we started Stickythings, is that you lose control of your order.

Deal directly with the label manufacturer

If you are not dealing directly with the printer, you’ll have a barrier between you and your order. Sometime this can be frustrating when dealing with artwork issues or trying to make an urgent enquiry or change. It’s a rigid process that doesn’t allow flexibility.

Here at Stickythings, every order placed on our website is kept in-house until dispatch. With a small team we can easily track and update your order throughout production.

One thing to make sure of when ordering pretty much anything online, does the company have a good track record of producing what you require with good customer service? Here at Stickythings we have an Excellent rated service with over 1,200 5* reviews. Of course we have some 1* negative reviews, with 25,000+ clients its unavoidable.

Client interaction pre and post order

If you take a look, we respond to all negative reviews and let them know where the problem originated and what fixes are necessary in future. We estimate around 1-5% of clients leave a review when they have a positive experience and around 90+% when they have a negative experience.

We have a dedicated member of our team on our support ticket system. So if you send us an enquiry we’ll get back to you 95% on the same day.

There are many ways to produce labels on various materials and many online label companies are competing for the same clients. If you’ve already checked the points above you’re on the right track of finding a good supplier. Price is an important factor, initially and ongoing. Many companies have targeted the label industry in the recent years to expand their print product offering.

Is it sustainable?

Many of the companies you see today were not producing labels online a few years ago, but mainly printed literature and are relatively new to the industry. Many of these large companies have printing presses worth upwards of a half million £’s and are producing label orders for £7, a simply unsustainable offering when you factor in costs of rental, materials, postage, labour etc.

Price comparison over the years

Our team has been producing labels online since 2007, offering our exact product range ever since. Many of the prices you see on our website are cheaper than they were in 2013, this is due to better technology allowing a bit more automation.

A major factor in price is whether you can have multiple designs across a print run without being charged for each design. Many online companies don’t allow this freebie and costs can rise high if you decide on different fragrances, ingredients etc etc. Minimum orders are a consideration too, you can order any quantity with our online service, with minimal setup fees. Many companies have a £50 minimum, not ideal when you need a sample or trail run.

If you do not posses the ability to design labels using graphic design software yourself, it leaves you paying for a graphic designer to produce them. Designers cost money, sometimes more than the labels will cost. If you want to change artwork, it’s an expense every time.

At Stickythings we have created a tool to let you design labels online, knowing that the designs you create will print without error. Our online label design software lets you freely design your artwork, allowing you to download them and keep for future reference.

Quality isn’t governed by the resolution of the printing press alone, it’s a combination of artwork, print experience and press capability. Here at Stickythings we combine all of those elements to meet the high standards we would expect of a leading label printing company.

Artwork for quality printing

Artwork is the most important step to get right. Without decent artwork, your results will be poor, or at least not as good as possible. We provide an artwork guide so that you can setup your artwork to get the best out of the label printers. You can choose to ignore the guide, however in our experience, those that do end up with less that top quality labels. We want you to get the very best quality available, especially as it takes us the same time to print lower quality as it does higher quality labels.

Printing Experience

Once the artwork gets into production, it goes through a process called a RIP. This converts the screen data into ink droplet data. This conversion can end up with unexpected results in the wrong hands. This is where our decades of experience come into play. We ensure that the translation between screen and ink is as close as possible. Ink density, colour overlaps, material ink limits are just a few of the items we adjust on the press, job to job. We really can’t emphasise enough how important our experience is at this stage to get the quality perfect.

Printing Resolutions & Material

We pick the very best materials, they are the most expensive materials for a very good reason. With over a decade of using the substrates, orders that we produce now are very similar to ones we produced back in 2013, despite new presses, technology moving on. It’s this consistency that is so important to a brand owner.

Our materials and presses have been profiled for the very best ink limits, meaning your labels look vibrant with the perfect amount of ink used enabling us to print at extremely high resolutions. With over a decade of using the same materials, you can be sure that consistency is at the forefront of quality control.