Notorious Beam Team

Heinz have launched a website in the States, called MyHeinz, offering the chance to customise your Heinz Ketchup label. I've tried to order some bottles for the office. This could be a really interesting way of offering customised bottles for Fathers' Day and Holiday. Or it could even be used as a way of giving consumers the chance to design their own label in a graphical sense. The best designs could either be made into limited editions or perhaps be used as a tool to redesign our brands' labels.

This is from the Lightning Labels Blog:

Last week after 130 years Heinz announced something completely new in the world of ketchup. No, the recipe hasn't changed, but you can now customize the label on their ketchup bottles. In celebration of the famous ketchup brand's 130th birthday Heinz is offering everyone the ability to create their very own ketchup label at www.myheinz.com.

The good news is that the minimum quantity is just one bottle and the cost starts as low as $4.50. The bad news is it takes 3-4 weeks and there is a pretty steep shipping & handling fee. Regardless, what Heinz is doing is a breakthrough. This is the first time a mass market consumer product like this is being offered with the ability to create your own label. I say it is about time.

The technology to be able to do this has been around for several years, but Heinz is the first company to attempt this on a large scale. The way they are doing it is most likely printing a large number of blank shells of their labels and then overprinting the personalized messages on these shells on a high speed digital printer. They are probably waiting to run a large batch all at once, which is why you have to wait 3-4 weeks.

Here at Lightning Labels we also have the capability to do labels like this. Because we only use digital label printing every label we produce can be different. We obviously hope this move by Heinz will be the first step in a continuing trend of personalized labels for consumer products. We are ready for it.