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Labels

It is bloody complicated

· Business

Launching

When launching Dips there was a lot to think about and obviously, as a food product the flavour comes out as the most important thing. However, there are a lot of other things that need to be considered too.
Packaging 
Design
Pack size
shelf presence
and of course labels.

We had no idea how much legislation there is around labels and the goal posts are constantly being moved, for larger companies this is not so much of a problem but as a small brand trying to get a foothold in the market it can be something that can put real pressure on your business.
Not only is there a ton of legislation about what you can and can't put on your label it can be quite hard to get hold of anyone in trading standards to check it over (this is not their fault they are woefully understaffed and these requests can take up a lot of time). All of this combined can make it very difficult to make sure your product labels legal.
Luckily I found a reasonably priced freelancer that can check your labels and is very helpful his name is Pedro Mendez he was recommended to me and we can't recommend him highly enough.

Once you have made sure your labels are legal you then have to figure out what you are going to print your labels on and find someone to do it for a price that is reasonable for your product. When printing labels the options are endless
Transparent or white stock
foiling
thick paper
matt or gloss finish
one colour or multiple colours
Fluorescent pigments (these can be very tricky to achieve) 
UV flexography or EP digital or Letterpress or hotfoil or thermal or gravure label 
Our suggestion on this front is to talk to lots of different people involved in the print trade shop around and talk to other people who are having labels printed and gather as much information as you can. One tip on this front is not to trust your home printer when it comes down to colours. The colours you print at home will not (almost 100 percent of the time) come out the same as when they are printed by the professionals and there are many reasons for this so we would highly recommend getting a test batch printed this can be as simple as getting them printed on a simple A4 contact sheet of the same stock you have decided to print your designs on to and actually cut them out by hand and put them on your products. This is especially true if you are planning on printing on to the transparent stock as the opacity of the transparent stock can change the final colour of the label quite dramatically. This may cost you some money in the short term but in the long term, if you decided to chance to do a large print run without doing this first you could end up wasting thousands of pounds on unuseable labels.
A good example of this is we have been undergoing a rebrand and have been getting our new labels printed on transparent stock. On the white backing paper, the colours really stood out and looked great however once we put them on to our jars the colour really washed out and you couldn't even see it. If we had spent lots of money even getting a small print run done off the bat it would have cost us hundreds of pounds luckily we did get test batch printed and found this problem up front and saved ourselves quite a bit of money.