Starter Kit. Idea 167 of 500. Cluster 7
Label-printing and barcode services in every district town
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Find out from the small producers in your district town where they get labels printed now, how long it takes, what it costs, and whether they have barcodes. With a good colour printer and label stock, print one run for a producer at a stated price, delivered in 2 days. Their next order, and the names they pass on, show the demand.
- Who pays first
- A small producer who wants to sell in supermarkets and needs proper labels and barcodes, fast and close to home.
- What leaves today
- Without a barcode and a proper label, a product cannot enter a supermarket at home or abroad, so it stays at the market stall.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask what labelling standard food and export products should follow.
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask how to register a small printing business.
Check before you spend
That labels you print carry what the law and buyers require, and how producers obtain genuine barcode numbers.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a producer pay for a run of labels?
- How many producers in the district need labels?
- What does a good label printer cost?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka House. Chapter Seventeen
"story, a shipping label, a buyer who knows your name."
A shipping label is one of the small things that turn product into money.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.