Smart Labels Protect Your Brand

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 a majority of product counterfeiting is in the pharmaceutical, medical and cosmetics industries, counterfeiters will target almost any products that have a value to them and can be sold on the streets or internet. These products and goods include perfumes, auto parts, toys, clothing, shoes, electrical devices, games, fashion accessories and much more.
What we as an industry find very interesting is that it is not just the products that are being counterfeited. Most of the genuine products have extensively designed packaging and labels which were designed to make consumers swipe the products off of the shelves and this packaging is being counterfeited too! Sometimes they even go as far as reproducing warranty documents for some of the products.
While we can’t prevent our customer’s products from being counterfeited, there is something that we can do as an industry to protect the counterfeiting of their product’s packaging, making it harder to sell. Counterfeit deterrence, brand protection and product authentication can be built into the design of the label or packaging from the beginning through the use of smart labels.
This can be done with a combination of both 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 of them require licensing or are too expensive for consumer goods. Others require special equipment to produce. However, there 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 the authenticity of a product.
Whitlam Group specializes in many of these smart label technologies and would be happy to help you develop a brand protection plan for your products. Please contact us if you would like to discuss your needs for smart packaging and smart labels.