The Total Package

The first book I ever read about package design was The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Tubes, by Thomas Hine, a Philadelphia-based author, as it turns out.

In his fascinating book, Hine describes the progression of packaging from utilitarian to manipulative. He cites products that are instantly recognizable by their labels even when the image is contorted and words are no longer visible. (Can you identify the product in the scrambled image above? P&G knows you can.) In an age when the label may be the most important component of packaging for conveying functional information, evoking emotion and influencing buying behavior, designing the label is only half the battle.

For lower volume operations, affixing the label by hand to a container can be tedious and time consuming, not to mention expensive and wasteful when labels and packages must be trashed when labels are haphazardly applied or broken from human handling. Small batch and low volume producers benefit greatly from a professional design and consistent label application. Consistency is something customers and distributors will expect in the product contents and one way to convey that is with repeatable labeling.

The Elmark labeler (below) is perfect for low volume bottle labeling with its semi-automatic application. Each time, the self-adhesive label is applied in the exact same way. By offering rolls of self-adhesive custom labels, Elmark offers options for seasonal products and producers with a variety of lower volume products.

The Elmark labeler can be hand-fed bottles one by one while the labels are auto-fed and rolled neatly onto each package. Larger operations may opt to employ a  collaborative robot (shown) which can pick up bottles, place them in the labeler, and then remove the labeled bottle to be placed in a bin. If you really want to get fancy, you can install some highly-visible indicator lights to let your production team know when it needs more labels or the bin is full when human assistance would be required.

This labeler will be on display at our next collaborative robot workshop (it’s free) on August 25 in Hatfield, PA. For more information or to sign up,  click here or call us at 215-997-5595.