Cover-Up Labels

What makes a label block out what is underneath

Two ways to get there, and most jobs use a bit of both. A high-opacity facestock stops light getting through the material itself. A block-out adhesive carries a grey or black pigment layer that kills anything still showing through. Put them together and you can cover solid dark artwork and multicolour graphics, not just text on white.

Ordinary white paper or film will not do this on its own. Hold a plain label over a printed carton and you will see the old print ghosting through, which is exactly what a scanner sees too. That is the difference worth paying for on this page, and it is the thing to specify when you ask us for a quote.

Covering barcodes so they scan clean

The most common reason people order these. A barcode printed into the packaging cannot be changed, so when a price, a code or a pack size changes, the cheap fix is to cover it rather than repackage. Block-out adhesive stops the scanner reading through to the old bars, and the new code prints on top.

Discounted stock is the classic case: rather than reprice hundreds of items one at a time in your system, cover the old code with one new code and add that code once. Sequential numbering and variable barcodes print on the same pass, so a range of unique codes costs no more than a single repeated one.

Short-term covers and permanent ones

Decide up front which of these you need, because the material changes completely.

If the label only has to hold until the product leaves the store, paper or a basic film with block-out adhesive is enough and it is the cheapest answer. If the label is going on an asset and has to stay put for years, on a car part, a wooden pallet, a metal cabinet or a piece of furniture, we build it on a synthetic stock with a durable adhesive instead. And if you are covering a mixed bag of surfaces at once, say so, and we will spec one generalised construction that grips all of them rather than sending you three different labels to keep track of.

Custom printed or blank cover-up labels

We print custom cover-up labels in full colour on our own press, with no minimums. We also carry blank cover-up stock with the block-out layer already in it, for anyone who would rather run their own on a laser or inkjet. Tell us what is underneath and what surface it is on, and we will tell you which one you need. Get a fast quote or take free samples and test one over your own artwork first.

Learn more

• Bar-Code Labels
• Durable Labels
• Consecutively Numbered Labels
• Piggyback Labels
• Pick your adhesive