Labels are not simply tags used to identify items, materials, or products.  Labels and stickers are used as an effective means for promotion, identification, tracking, warning, awareness, mailing, safety, and much, much more!

Of the more common commercial uses, labels are used to promote public figures (campaign bumper stickers, for example) and to sell product.  The labeling or packaging of a product can and does serve to help items “stand out” from other, similar items and lead consumers to purchase one product over the other.  Imagine grocery shopping.  What makes you choose one item on the shelf over another?  More often than not, it is the label on the product that influences your decision.

Labels today are manufactured in a multitude of ways and looks.  There are literally dozens of choices for the label stock and finish.  Everything from plain white and fluorescent colors to glossy and hologram stocks and films are used to impact the look-and-feel of the final printed label.  There are even domed labels to add extract pizzazz to certain jobs.  And, for many label products, you can choose from additional features such as:  Aqueous coating; UV inks / finishes; Indoor / outdoor materials; Tamper-resistant or tamper-evident stocks; Permanent / semi-permanent / or removable adhesives; and even more.

Labels are used in both business and personal matters on a daily basis.  Take the obvious use of labels for sending packages, letters, and other mail to clients, friends, and family for instance.  Even this most basic use of a label has dozens, if not hundreds, of options.  From simple return address labels and basic “to / from” labels – to complex integrated shipping label / form combinations – mailing labels are a common staple in today’s modern environment.

So, what are labels really used for?  To make a long story short, labels are used for just about any / every purpose imaginable – both in the business world and in your home.  Labels help businesses keep track of inventory or possessions, promote products, announce new features, and keep workers safe from hazards.  In our personal lives, labels help us choose the food we eat, the products we buy, and also direct us on how and when to use certain many of the items in our homes.

Mark Trumper

CEO

MaverickLabel.Com

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Edmonds, WA (PRWEB) October 12, 2009 — MaverickLabel.Com®, a leading custom printed label manufacturer, has received a patent on their technology for consolidating multiple quoting systems into one customer interface. The job quoting technology, with the registered trademark “UberQuoter®”, has the ability to access multiple quoting engines–be they simple tables, complex databases, or real-time algorithms– and retrieve product information in order to deliver an optimized quote for the printing of custom labels.

Ordering product labels can be a complex process with many product variables such as label shape, material, number of colors, laminate type, etc. There are also parameters for how the labels should be received by the customer: the total quantity, the amount per shipment, the timeframe for delivery, etc. Each specification changes how the order could be completed. MaverickLabel.Com’s UberQuoter® technology uses a decision support system to integrate the various specifications provided by the customer and provide a set of quotes that is presented by price or delivery time.

The patent is for a technology that we are only beginning to capitalize on. The UberQuoter has the potential to incorporate more and more technologies on the back end. And, for our customers, it holds immense opportunity to help them through the ordering process, improve their experience, and get the right product to them, at the best price, with optimum turnaround time.

The web experience taps into the idea of having an expert guide [the customer] through the choices to ensure that the finished product is correct

Perhaps a certain kind of material they’ve selected can’t be embossed; if embossing is an important feature to them, then the quoter alerts the customer so they can make a different selection right then.

And it’s never done

We are constantly adding to the website and the decision support system. As our business and technologies expand, so will the UberQuoter®.

From a manufacturing and delivery perspective, MaverickLabel.Com has different presses, manufacturing capabilities, and locations. Different production methods (e.g. digital, flexographic, offset, hot stamp, silkscreen, etc.) dictate which machines and locations could handle the order. The UberQuoter® technology enables MaverickLabel.Com to manage their resources while providing an instant quote to the customer. Plus it allows the company to bring new technologies to the customer quickly, integrating them into the quoting system as they are brought on line.

Rick Kent, president and “Chief Science Officer” of MaverickLabel.Com, comments, “The patent is for a technology that we are only beginning to capitalize on. The UberQuoter has the potential to incorporate more and more technologies on the back end. And, for our customers, it holds immense opportunity to help them through the ordering process, improve their experience, and get the right product to them, at the best price, with optimum turnaround time.”

The UberQuoter® technology integrates the decision support system into the label order specification page on the website. From a website usability and customer-satisfaction perspective, the technology helps the customer as they input their information; much like an expert at a label shop would help the customer with their order. “The web experience taps into the idea of having an expert guide [the customer] through the choices to ensure that the finished product is correct,” explains Kent. “Perhaps a certain kind of material they’ve selected can’t be embossed; if embossing is an important feature to them, then the quoter alerts the customer so they can make a different selection right then.”

When the company began in 1994 there were no formal quoting systems online. Instead proprietary techniques were used to provide pricing to their customers. Eventually the team built an algorithm-based quoting system targeted at just one of their printing technologies. As the company added more capabilities and manufacturing systems, each required a separate quoting engine, which led to customer confusion on which quoter to use. At that point MaverickLabel.Com decided they needed to develop a streamlined system that helps their customers through the quoting process. From this, the UberQuoter technology was born.

“And it’s never done,” says Kent. “We are constantly adding to the website and the decision support system. As our business and technologies expand, so will the UberQuoter®.”

About MaverickLabel.Com

MaverickLabel.Com offers hundreds of custom and stock label products, in a secure, online environment. In addition, the company has one of the most comprehensive ordering systems available, including online proofing and online design tools for most items. Visit http://www.mavericklabel.com/ for more information

Contact

Mark Trumper, CEO
MaverickLabel.Com
800.537.8816
http://www.mavericklabel.com/

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After a lengthy research and testing period, we have today officially added a new, Earth friendly label material – NatureFlex™ biodegradable label films – to our extensive label stock selection.

Perfectly suited for products like food and beverage labeling, as well as high-impact nutraceutical and pharmacy product packaging, NatureFlex™ label films are made of regenerated cellulose, which starts as wood pulp.  NatureFlex™ has been proven to fully biodegrade in as little as 16 weeks – making this a truly environmentally conscious label material.

MaverickLabel.Com® proudly offers the NatureFlex™ label film in 1.8 mil White and Clear choices on many of our most popular products, including our process color labels.

To ensure MaverickLabel.Com® customers would be completely satisfied with this new label stock material, we spent countless hours over several months performing both indoor and outdoor quality tests.  And, the results of these tests were fantastic.  Labels printed on NatureFlex™ stock both looked great and had tremendous durability.

We are constantly striving to do our part to be more Earth sensitive and this product is a perfect fit to our existing label stock material choices.

Find more details about NatureFlex™ label stock at our Process Color Labels product page…
http://www.mavericklabel.com/process_color.html

Mark Trumper, CEO
MaverickLabel.Com®
800.537.8816

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Even in these barren economic times, the cost of purchasing a new ink jet printer is amazingly low. Printer manufacturers often sell these printers below cost, which sounds like an awfully bad deal for printer manufacturers. Sounds like, but isn’t. Believe it or not, this type of sales logic dates back over a hundred years to a man named King.

King C. Gillette, whose last name now adorns items in men’s grooming kits around the world, stumbled upon the idea of the disposable razor when he was working as a traveling salesman in the late 1890s. His plan was to craft a razor handle of good quality, and to sell the handle at a small loss. Doing so would encourage users to keep buying replacement blades, which could be sold at a profit, in order to create customers who returned on a regular basis.

This type of sales strategy, sell a loss leader to promote regular, more profitable sales became known as the Razor and Blades business model, and has been employed numerous times since its inception. When Standard Oil wanted to move into China, they gave away 8 million kerosene lamps in order to create a market for the lamps’ oil. Electronics manufacturer Apple has stated that it doesn’t make much money from iPod sales, instead profits are derived from its iTunes Store. And, of course, there are printer companies, whose use of this tactic is notorious.

A brand new ink jet printer can be purchased from most big box stores for less than $50, setting an incredibly low bar for an average quality consumer color printer. However, replacing the cartridges for that printer will cost the consumer almost as much as the printer itself, and sometimes more.

And therein lies the rub. At consumer pricing, the ink for printers can cost up to $8000 per gallon, making it one of the most costly liquids known to man. This price scales down to make printing relatively affordable for small operations like home users and students. However, as business owners can quickly find out, when printing things like cheap color labels and business cards on anywhere near a regular basis, the cost of ink can really add up. This type of profit plan makes a do-it-yourself solution only feasible when printing is done infrequently at best.

The problem with the Razor and the Blades strategy is that scaling does not pass economic benefits to the consumer. During good economic times, the squeeze of the Razor and Blade business plans is tough, but during a recession, it can be brutal. The problem becomes not how to make the most in a loss leader economy, but rather how to escape it.

The obvious solution is to try and capitalize on a wholesale economy, where sellers lower their profit margins in exchange for a guarantee of more sales. With printer ink, there is obviously a great bit of space for the prices to fall. But to make the most of those savings, a printer has to buy in very large quantities, which puts a small business an economic position that is worse than the current one.

The solution is to allow someone else to shoulder the bulk of the wholesale burden by relying on a third party for printing. The thought of making use of an outside printer might seem foreign, but it provides a great deal of advantages. Offloading your printing means that you’re only going to be paying for the ink you use, and thus you’ll be saving some money.

Moving some of your printing to a third party means that you’ll need to consider what you’ll print, as you can’t simply offload everything. Here is where a little knowledge of knowing your printing habits comes in handy. By identifying what you print over and over again on regular basis, things like business cards, labels, and forms, allows you to outsource those printing jobs. True, you’ll still need to do some printing on your own, but with careful planning and working with a the printer, you can hopefully drop the total amount of printing you do on your own to a manageable level and land in a more comfortable section of the Razor and Blade business model.

MaverickLabel.com can help you reduce your label printing costs by printing your shipping labels. Still need inkjet labels?

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The line between online content and the offline world is quickly eroding. For years it has been common place to include a web address on marketing materials, package wrappers, and signage, but these addresses required the viewer to maintain an interest in a company or website from the point of discovery to they reach a computer, or to peck out an address on a cell phone. This gap in access between discovery and information, allows for any number of distractions to swoop in and siphon off a customer who might be fence sitting on a product. A unique combination of several technologies is doing what it can to erase this gap. That practice, already widespread in Japan, is set to make the jump to the United States in the near future.

The concept is called “mobile tagging” and it typically involves a two-dimensional barcode, a camera phone, and a webpage created specifically for mobile phone browsers.

The two-dimensional barcode is not necessarily a new invention, having been created in both the United States and Japan almost simultaneously in the mid-1990s. The result is a barcode that makes use of blots, or boxes, or dots rather than simple vertical lines. These barcodes are able to encode a great deal of data – an upper limit of 4000 or so characters compared to the twenty or so of a traditional barcode. The ability to pack that much data into such a tiny spot has turned the barcode from a simple method of tracking into a means to relay human-meaningful information.

The cell phone isn’t new either. However, the wide scale proliferation of mobile phones was paired by the addition of inexpensive digital cameras and access to the mobile internet. With the aide of relatively simple programs, mobile phones could learn to read matrix barcodes, and if the barcode contained a web address, the mobile phone could access the website right then. The gap between discovery and access was stopped.

The concept itself seems rather simple. However, it’s the applications that hold a great deal of potential. The matrix barcode, when used in mobile tagging, has several advantages over the written web address.

First, and perhaps foremost, the viewer does not know exactly what to expect when they view a matrix barcode without a camera which can read it. Sure, the viewer can garner some basic assumptions from context clues, but where the code points to is actually a mystery. To capitalize on the mystery, it is common for two-dimensional barcodes to be served without context clues on plain white billboards. For a viewer, the need to understand, the need to justify such a massive barcode, is prompt enough actively respond to the tag, pull out a cell phone and snap a photo. At that point, the website is a click away and the viewer has done a great deal of the leg work in become an actual consumer.

Another advantage of using a two-dimensional barcode over a printed web address: long and specific addresses are preferred rather than forbidden. Customers engaging in mobile tagging can be directed to specific landing pages, tailored not only for a mobile device, but also based on geo-location. When a unique two-dimensional barcode is created based on the location in which it will be displayed, or to match the content it is paired with, the end result is targeted information that is greatly more relevant to the viewer. The more relevant the content, the greater the chance of turning a visitor into a customer.

Not all two-dimensional barcodes are simply marketing tools, though. Nor do they have to contain a simple web address. In Japan, matrix barcodes have replaced nutritional labels on food packages – redirecting the viewer to a mobile webpage that contains that information instead. Another common use is location-specific information, which is particularly popular in the tourism industry. A two-dimensional barcode next to a work of art or historic building can direct visitors to information that is far too detailed and lengthy to fit on a sign.

In the end, the variety of uses for two-dimensional barcodes is largely limited only by the imagination of the creator. Much as the internet is freeing ideas and connecting individuals, the question one should be asking about mobile tagging is “How could the internet help my situation if it weren’t bound to a computer?” After all, this isn’t a technology that’s bound solely to Japan. Currently in Apple’s App store, there are no fewer than three mobile tagging programs for the device. Mobile tagging is coming.

Visit MaverickLabel.com for your barcode labels. Or you can read our 2-d barcode label below.

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We offer several different custom label stocks, each of which can help to create a unique and impressive product label, packaging label, or promotional label. These custom label stocks can add special effects to the label, making it truly one-of-a-kind. These special effects stocks come in several different varieties, including: 3D / raised, sparkling, shiny, and more. And, there’s an added bonus… Some of these material choices can be used to add a security element to your label / packaging.

Below is a brief description of some popular label stock choices for creating an eye-catching, distinctive label…

Domed Label Stock: Domed labels are made with a thick, yet crystal-clear, polyurethane dome, which is laid over the printed label. This dome protects the printing and adds approximately 1/4 inch of thickness to the label – giving it a three-dimensional (3D) appearance. And, Domed Labels are weather resistant. More About Dome Labels

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Hologram Label Material: Hologram label stock is excellent for making your label stand out – and has the added bonus of being used as a means of security, product authentication, and protection against counterfeiting. Hologram label material adds impact and draws attention to your design. More About Hologram Labels

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Clear Labels:
Clear labels can be used in many different ways. Using a clear label stock can be especially appealing for use as product labeling on glass bottles, jars, etc., as it can be used in conjunction with the coloring of the product in the container. MaverickLabel.Com offers clear labels printed on tough, crystal clear polyester with permanent adhesive – as well as a non-adhesive, static-cling material for use on windows.

Die Cut Shapes and Sizes: Die cut labels offer a fantastic opportunity for you to create a truly unique label. You can choose from an extensive line of existing shapes and sizes – or you can choose to have a die created in your own design’s shape. Die cut labels from MaverickLabel.Com are available in dozens of styles and option choices, including: core sizes, indoor / outdoor label materials, clear or colored label stocks, and literally dozens of shape choices. More About Process Color Labels with Special Die Shapes

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Foil / Embossed Label Stock: Foil and embossed label stocks add incredible appeal to your label. Foil / embossed labels from MaverickLabel.Com are printed on an extra shiny, metalized label material available in nine foil color choices. (Silver and gold are the most popular choices, but black, purple, red, dark blue, teal and other foil stocks are also available.) Embossed labels and seals make a truly lasting impression, with a special stamping process, which can take your label design to the next level. Custom printed foil and embossed labels are ideal for anniversaries, weddings, as well as any retail application in which you’d like your label to stand out from the crowd. More About Foil and Embossed Labels

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No matter your reason for using them, custom label stocks can and do add impact and draw attention to your label design. So, next time you’re looking to create a unique, innovative label – consider using one of the custom stocks above. Or, feel free to contact us for advice or assistance.

Mark Trumper
MaverickLabel.Com – CEO

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In the second article we talk about the texture of the surfaces and how that affects the strength of the bond, among other things. You can read more about that here.

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Traditional label printing is done on large mechanical flexographic printing presses. These presses require artwork to be output to film – for creation of rubber printing plates. These plates are then attached to the presses, inks are mixed, and the machine is hand-calibrated to the specifics of each job.

Present-day digital label printing equipment is much different, eliminating all of the above tasks! Doing away with these steps creates many advantages over flexographic label printing, including: Faster delivery / turnaround time; Low minimum quantities; No die or plate charges; Higher quality; 4-color process printing; and much more!

The main benefits to customers are:

Delivery Speed…

Because digital printing eliminates the need for plates and lengthy press set-up, labels are produced much faster – in mere minutes instead of hours in most cases. This is especially true with multiple color (4-color process) jobs, which can require running the same label through the press multiple times to complete the job.

Better Pricing…

Again, because digital printing eliminates the need for the creation of printing plates, and because each job takes less time to set-up, the actual cost per label is much less.

Low Minimums…

Digital label printing makes it possible to provide customers with label quantities as few as one label – or as large as 25,000– all at very affordable pricing. Additionally, digital labels can be produced at practically any size, with no die requirements.

Quality…

Digital printing translates into high-quality, picture perfect labels on each and every label order! Digital printing technology produces rich, vibrant labels – with none of the banding or gear marks that you have undoubtedly seen with traditional label printing.

4-Color Process…

Digital printing makes it easy to order perfect 4-color process (photographic) labels. Unlike flexographic printing, where single / spot colors are typically used, digitally printed labels are always produced from a mixture of 4-colors – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. This process makes it easy on customers from the standpoint that they can submit artwork with photos and/or other multi-colored artwork – without any worries!

Digitally printed labels are an excellent choice for wine bottle labels, health and beauty packaging / labels, food labels, bath and body labels, and/or any other product where the label itself can be used to enhance the product’s appeal. This is because digitally printed labels are produced with a higher line-screen than traditional flexographic label printing – typically 230 lines versus only 133 or 150 for flexographic printing. This equates to a huge difference in the label’s detail, color, overall clarity and vividness.

Today’s digital printing makes ordering labels both easier and more affordable!

Mark Trumper

MaverickLabel.Com
marktrumper@mavericklabel.com

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Mark Trumper is the CEO of MaverickLabel.Com – leading pioneer of label products via the Internet. The MaverickLabel.Com website offers asset tags and labels, as well as hundreds of other label products, in a secure online environment.

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