The cheapest part. And the choice that decides everything.
A label of a few cents can sink a project worth tens of thousands of euros. Metal and liquids disturb the signal, and a label that works fine on cardboard is useless on a steel cart. So this is the first thing we test and not the last.
First pick the label that works on your material, then the rest.
What to look at when you choose
Five questions that decide the label type. The answer to the first two usually rules out half the range already.
- What it sits on
- Cardboard, plastic or metal. Metal asks for a tag with a spacer
- What it goes through
- Washing, freezing, standing outside, cleaning agents or high temperatures
- How long it has to last
- Once, along with the box, or years on a reusable carrier
- How big it may be
- A bigger antenna reads further, but does not always fit on the object
- What it costs per unit
- From a few cents to many times that for metal and laundry tags
Seven types
Which type belongs to which situation
The names say little, the situation they belong in says plenty. This is the short version; which one fits your material exactly comes out of a test.
- Standard label
- Boxes, packaging and cardboard. Self-adhesive, printable, the lowest price per unit
- On-metal label
- Thin and flexible, but it does read on metal. For tools, carts and racking
- Hard tag
- A housing around it, to last for years under knocks, damp and chemicals
- On-metal hard tag
- The same, but on machines, vehicles and steel returnable packaging
- Retail label
- Discreet on clothing or a price ticket, printable, for the sales floor
- Laundry label
- Stays readable after repeated industrial washing. For textiles and workwear
- Inlay
- Chip and antenna without a carrier, the basis for a custom label
Price and lead time differ a lot across these seven. A hard tag costs many times a standard label, and that is exactly why the question is not which label is best but which label you need.
On metal
Metal is not difficult, it is unworkable without the right label
Metal reflects the signal and detunes the antenna. An ordinary label stuck on a steel cart does not read, or reads ten centimeters. On-metal labels solve that with an adapted antenna and a spacer, and stay thin enough to stick on a curved surface. Where the label cannot hold up, it moves to a hard tag.
Lasting for years
A hard tag is not a fancier sticker
A hard tag sits in a housing and gets screwed, stapled, clicked or glued on. Which of those four it becomes depends on the material and on what the item has to survive. Gluing is not the cheap option here: it uses industrial structural adhesive, the same kind that holds aircraft parts together. A hard tag costs more per unit and more time to apply, and it lasts for years under knocks, water, dirt and cleaning agents. For a box that goes out the door once that is money thrown away; for a cart that runs around for twenty years it is the only thing that works.
- Applying
- Screwing, stapling, clicking or gluing
- Lasts
- Years, outdoors and under heavy use as well
- Unit cost
- Many times a standard label
Made to measure
If none of the seven fits, it starts at the inlay
An inlay holds only the chip with its antenna. That is the building block a custom label is made from: another shape, another size, or a label that disappears into existing packaging or an existing ticket. Which inlay it becomes depends on the range you need and on what the label has to survive. That is measuring work, not a catalog question.
What a well chosen label does and what it does not do
Wel
- Stay reliably readable in the environment where it is really used
- Last as long as the object lasts
- Get encoded during printing, in one action
- Work on metal, provided it was made for that
Niet
- Perform the same on every material
- Be read through a metal wall
- Replace a reading moment that the process does not have
- Be cheap and suitable for everything at the same time
This is the place where we promise nothing without having measured. Whether a label works on your material depends on the shape of the object, the spot of the label and what sits around it. That is why a label test is part of every Proof of Value, and why the report also states which labels did not do it.