One of the things that makes being a distributor so fun is the variety of things you can sell. One day you’re selling printing and office supplies. The next day you’re selling promotional products and durable labels. Every day is different.
Winning the Job Is Only the First Step
However, winning the job is only the first step. Now you have to maintain that relationship and keep it. In some categories, an aggressive competitor could easily come in and undercut you on price or turnaround. That’s why it’s important to mix in stickier products like durable labels. Account relationships based on these products are much more difficult to dislodge.
What’s a durable label? It’s a label that is affixed permanently or for a significant duration to the product itself. Examples include identification labels on power tools and marine containers. These are challenging applications. How do you find the right adhesive to adhere to metal or plastic even when the product is sitting outside in the rain, being exposed to wind and abrasion, or submerged in sea water for months at a time?
Wise has the right experience to help you navigate these applications and deepen your relationships with your customers who sell them. Once you help those customers find the right combination of label stock and adhesive for the application, you won’t easily lose that business, even if someone else offers a lower price. That business is sticky.
When Durable Labels Go Wrong
So where do you start? In selling durable labels, you sell into the operations side of the business rather than the marketing side. Then you start asking questions that will open doors to offering solutions.
For example, you might ask: “Have you ever had a durable label go wrong?” If the answer is yes, you can follow up: “Tell me about that.”
You might be surprised by how frequently labels malfunction and how crazy some of the stories can be. It’s not unusual for labels to fail because the material, adhesive, or print system didn’t match the environment or substrate, leading to peeling, falling off, wrinkling, or delamination. With Wise in your pocket, this opens the door for you to talk about solutions.
To give you an idea of what these mishaps might look like, here are a few real-world examples (some details have been changed for privacy):
1. Iced Tea Bottles: Labels Sliding Off in Refrigerated Merchandisers
A ready-to-drink beverage company applied standard permanent-adhesive labels to its iced tea bottles, which spent most of their life in refrigerated, high-humidity store merchandisers. Within weeks, the company started receiving complaints that labels were sliding off or detaching completely in the cooler.
Root cause: Adhesive not formulated for condensation + cold-chain moisture.
Fix: Switched to a wet-strength permanent adhesive engineered for chilled and moisture-rich environments.
2. Shampoo Bottle Redesign: Existing Label Began Peeling
A personal-care manufacturer redesigned one of its shampoo bottles. Although the new bottle looked nearly identical to the prior version, the pressure-sensitive label that had worked flawlessly on the original container began lifting at the edges and peeling on the new one.
Root cause: Minor changes in the new bottle’s plastic—resin blend, colorant, or anti-stat additives—altered surface energy, making the previous label construction chemically incompatible, so adhesion failed.
Lesson: Even “same-looking” substrates may require different adhesive systems.
3. Frozen Meal Cartons: Cold-Storage Labels Peeling and Becoming Unreadable
In a frozen-food distribution center, operators began noticing that carton ID labels on frozen entrées were peeling off, and many remaining labels became blurred or unreadable after a few days in sub-zero storage.
Root cause: Low-cost/incorrect adhesive not designed for below-freezing temperatures, combined with moisture condensation cycles during loading/unloading.
Impact: Mispicks, routing errors, and manual relabeling/recounts across multiple pallets.
Opening Doors to the Sticky Sale
Your customers (or potential customers) have problems, and Wise has solutions. Asking the right questions will open doors to those conversations.
Some of these applications can be very complex, but you don’t need to have the answers right away. Once you find out what issues your customers are having, bring those issues to us. We’ll explain why the delamination or fading occurred and what to do about it. This allows you to be the expert, taking the right solution back to the customer (or prospect) with confidence.
Once the problem is solved, your customer is highly unlikely to take that business anywhere else. That’s the value of sticky.
