Care Label Conundrum
The finished labels
One of the things that I hope I’ll enjoy about creating for The Cranford Cabinet is that the things I’ll be making will periodically change as I come up with new Series of limited editions. This also throws up the challenge of labelling them in a helpful way.
My personal reading around this online is that if people don’t know how to look after something they’re less likely to buy so even from a sales perspective let alone providing care instructions for ensuring the longevity of something I’ve made, it will be super important to take good care over the job of labelling.
Given my items will be made from different materials and have different uses I can’t just put the same care instructions on each. I also wanted a way of labelling the Series and item number on each to show they are limited editions. I can also not afford nor meet the minimum order quantities to make new labels for each Series.
I took inspiration from a great little company called Paynter that labels each of their jacket editions with a fabric pen and more from another small business that had labels printed with space to write next to fabric content options.
I needed to come up with a design that encompassed the right care information for all the possible CC Series I could imagine and have an aesthetic that fit with the rest of my materials in an affordable way.
I won’t give you all the ins and outs but suffice to say I went at this project like the detail-oriented, science-background uber nerd that I am and requested a load of label samples, the most promising fabric pen options I could find and set about doing some tests.
I wasn’t enamoured with the silky white polyester fabric that you’ll most commonly find with garment care printed on in your clothing which limited my possible material options. This silky option feels good to wear and is usually non-scratchy though. I liked the matt finish of cotton and linen of the alternatives. I also tried printing with a stamp and fabric ink which turned out to be too fiddly. Moving on to writing on the front-running materials for legibility and washing them to see if they were wash-fast was the next step.
Using the solution of leaving spaces next to material names to add a percentage alongside and adding all possible washing instructions to manually strike-through with pen I sent the info to Em Hyett to lay out nicely for printing. After a bit of a material delay the labels were printed in Leicestershire onto a coated cotton white ribbon in The Cranford Cabinet navy ink.
I’m happy with the results and only time will tell how they perform though I’m sure that will differ with each Series which is unavoidable. The printing reads a bit more blue-grey than navy than I would have hoped but I think that’s down to my inexperience in understanding the requirements and limitations of label processing. I have 1000 (minimum order quantity) of these to use up before I can change anything so for the moment I think they are more than good enough :)