‘Peel and Read’ solves language barrier

Jules Lejeune, managing director of FINAT, the worldwide self-adhesive label association, discusses the trend toward ‘peel and read’ labels

The demands on labels are increasing rapidly. Increasing legislative requirements to provide more and more information on labels has created a problem for manufacturers who want eye catching, attractive labels but have simply run out of space.

Only last year new European legislation was introduced, called the Seventh Amendment, which demanded that much more information is provided on health and beauty products and which was virtually impossible to provide on some containers – such as lipsticks or eye shadow. Some of these labels can be as small as a little finger nail because of the size of the container.

Added to this is the growing trend to ‘globalize’ a product and its image so that one label becomes the common design to markets where 20 or more languages are used by the customers.

This space problem is common to many industries – food, paints, motor oils for instance – when a common brand image is sold in many countries and each requires information and instructions that purchasers can understand in their own language.

Our members’ solution to the problem has come in the form of ‘peel and read’ labels. The label is created with laminated labels of two or more layers of film that can be peeled back to expose the relevant language. This technique can be used to create books of many pages that are applied to the product just as a conventional self-adhesive label would be.

It is the answer to this pressing space problem that other means of product decoration cannot cope with and while it might be slightly more expensive, per label, to use these laminations, their advantages more than outweigh the extra cost.

First it enables manufacturers to meet the legal requirements while retaining an effective ‘sales appeal’ design but it also enables them to run a common label across many national markets without the need for short runs and frequent changes to cope with each country’s language, which can be more expensive in the longer run. 

This space problem is particularly acute in Europe, but even in areas such as the United States, where most labels are usually only in English and Spanish, the peel and read products serve their purpose by meeting the demand for extra product information.