It’s Just a Sticker, Right?

Quite often I get asked what our company  does and it is time for the good old “elevator speech” to be rolled out.

You know the “Winco makes labels and uses them as part of solutions to help people be able to improve their business and make things work better” kind of thing.

Of course, this is totally meaningless to most people, but they do recognize the label part. “Ah, labels? Great – you must get into cool graphic design and all that high tech printing technology – sounds like a great thing to do!”

“Well” I say “we certainly do some of that, but the majority of the labels we make are blank – the customer prints them at the time they are needed”

“Oh, you just make stickers, then. Boring!”

Hmm… I must admit that one the face of it, being a manufacturer of blank labels (not stickers, please!) doesn’t seem to be the most glamorous business to be in, but it is what our clients can do with these labels that makes them special.

Most of these labels that we sell are printed on thermal printers by our clients, right at the time they are needed. Once this happens, the humble label is now really important – a carrier of information.

Did you see my recent presentation about giving a “digital voice” to assets and other items? By encoding unique ID information into the label, whether by barcode or RFID, the label enables the part to be able to communicate with us – provide us with information about what it is, where it is, what it is worth, etc.

We see this in action every day; tracking of our UPS shipments, at the supermarket checkout, when we scan a QR Code in a magazine – the printed data is making the part become interactive.

Whether it is keeping track of the IT assets in our office or keeping the global supply chain working, the data encoded onto those blank labels is the starting point to making it all happen.

And you think our labels are not glamorous? Shame on you!

So if you happen to need any of these super glamorous blank labels (for just about every possible application) just let us know – we can do those nice printed ones for you as well!