Labels are everywhere as barcodes, delivery addresses, on sweet packets and on countless other things. Start your own business printing labels for people.
Label printing is a great business, modern label printers are able to print large volumes of labels, cheap and fast, and to keep up with this labels are disposable meaning repeat business. Here is how to get started.
Getting started
You will need at least one high volume label printer to get started, a desktop model is fine, the most popular brand for this is Zebra, but there are a few others. Afterwards, you can add more printers to grow your business.
The type of labels you’ll be printing is self-adhesive paper labels. Depending on your clients’ needs and on the machine you will either use direct thermal printing or thermal transfer. Thermal printing prints direct onto the paper without the need for ink. But the paper is quite expensive. Thermal transfer requires an ink ribbon which is transferred onto the normal paper label; this paper label is cheaper than thermal paper but has the added cost of an ink ribbon. Also, normal paper labels with ribbon give a more vibrant image and allow you to work with gloss or semi-gloss paper which looks nicer than thermal paper. Thermal paper has other limitations as well such as it cannot handle excessive heat.
Your machine will determine how wide you will be able to print, but rarely will you print wider than 10cm wide as the labels used for this purpose is rarely that wide, also that is the maximum width of most desktop label printers.
These labels are also rarely printed in more than one colour as the machine was made to print high volume single colour items. While you can use two colour ribbons in combination it is more popular to use a different colour sticker than to use a different colour ink ribbon.
If you don’t have a lot of capital, the best place to buy the machines would be second hand from classifieds as they are quite expensive new.
