What Is A Smart Label?
A smart label is an advanced label that integrates technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), NFC (Near Field Communication), or QR codes to provide additional product information. These labels enable real-time tracking, authentication, and data storage, enhancing the functionality of products. For example, RFID tags in smart labels allow for efficient inventory management and theft prevention. At the same time, NFC or QR codes can engage customers with interactive experiences or provide detailed product information via a smartphone scan. Smart labels are also invaluable in industries requiring enhanced security, traceability, and consumer interaction, offering significant upgrades on other traditional labeling solutions.
Smart Labels And Printing Security
Recent studies have shown that product counterfeiting cost companies between $250 and $600 billion per year: a staggering number that could easily be prevented with the proper application of smart labels and product packaging to protect your brand.
While most product counterfeiting occurs in the pharmaceutical, medical, and cosmetics industries, counterfeiters will target almost any product that has value and can be sold on the streets or the Internet. These products and goods include perfumes, auto parts, toys, clothing, shoes, electrical devices, games, fashion accessories, and much more.
We as an industry find it very interesting that it is not just the products being counterfeited. Most genuine products have extensively designed packaging and labels that were designed to make consumers swipe the products off of the shelves, and this packaging is being counterfeited, too! Sometimes, they even reproduce warranty documents for some of the products.
How Do Smart Labels Work?
While we can’t prevent our customers’ products from being counterfeited, we can do something as an industry to protect the packaging of their products, making it harder to sell. Through the use of smart labels, counterfeit deterrence, brand protection, and product authentication can be built into the design of the label or packaging from the beginning.
This can be done using a combination of lower-cost and higher-cost technologies to provide our clients with the most cost-effective smart label solutions. We can make each label or product unique, regularly changing the smart label technology used to protect our clients from counterfeiting.
There are literally hundreds of smart label solutions. Some require licensing or are too expensive for consumer goods. Others require special equipment to produce. However, it is still very likely that there is a smart label solution that could be used for your products to protect you from knock-offs.
The possibilities for smart labels include security designs and backgrounds, security substrates, varnishes and coatings, sequential numbering and coding, security inks, and more. On the more high-tech side, there are options for smart labeling such as bio-codes, DNA, primarily holograms, optically variable inks, RFID chips, and QR codes to check a product’s authenticity.
Work With Whitlam Group Today
Whitlam Group specializes in many smart label technologies and would happily help you develop a product brand protection plan. Please contact us to discuss your needs for smart packaging and smart labels.