Hang Tags and Packaging: What Is Worth Spending On
By The Velocity Wear Team
Packaging is where new brands most reliably spend money in the wrong order. Custom boxes, printed tissue, stickers and a card with a message get commissioned before the brand knows whether the garment sells, and none of it makes a garment better. But a bare product with no tag also looks unfinished, particularly on a rail. The useful question is which parts do work.
The hang tag earns its place
It is the cheapest item in the list and the one that does the most, for two reasons. On a rail it is what distinguishes a branded garment from a blank, which matters enormously if you ever sell through a shop or at a market. And in a customer's hands it is the one place you can put information the garment cannot carry.
Use that space properly: fabric weight, what the print method is, how to wash it and why, and where it was made. A tag that says something useful is read; a tag with just a logo is discarded.
What to spend on, roughly in order
- 1A decent hang tag on reasonable card stock. Thickness is what reads as quality here, more than printing technique.
- 2A good neck label, since it is the part a customer touches repeatedly for the life of the garment.
- 3A plain but sturdy mailer that arrives undamaged. Reliability beats decoration for the first order.
- 4A printed or stickered mailer, once you know the product sells. This is genuinely nice and genuinely optional.
- 5Boxes, tissue, ribbon and inserts, which are the last things worth adding and the first things brands do.
The tag can carry compliance too
One caution: a hang tag does not satisfy labelling requirements, because it is removed. Fibre composition and the other required disclosures have to be on a label attached to the garment, not on a swing ticket.
And if you sell into Canada, remember that packaging and accompanying materials carry their own bilingual obligations, and Quebec's language requirements reach inscriptions on tags and packaging as well as the garment itself. Design the tag with space for two languages rather than shrinking the type later.
Sustainability, honestly
Packaging is where brands most often make environmental claims, and where those claims are most easily checked. "Recyclable" is only meaningful if there is a practical route for the customer to recycle it, and a paper mailer with a plastic window is not straightforwardly recyclable anywhere.
Say the specific true thing — "paper mailer, no plastic" — rather than a general claim. Under the UK's Green Claims Code and Canada's competition law provisions, specific and substantiated is both safer and more persuasive than broad and unfalsifiable.
Have it made with the garments
Hang tags, labels and branded packaging can be produced alongside a run, which means one approval round and one delivery rather than three suppliers, three schedules and a garment sitting in a box waiting for its tags to arrive.
It also keeps the artwork consistent. A label made in one place and a tag made in another drift apart on colour surprisingly easily, and matching them afterwards is harder than specifying them together.
The thing that actually matters
For a first order, put the money in the garment. A heavier fabric, a better print, a proper neck label — those are what a customer keeps and what makes them buy again. Packaging is the thing they open once.
It is worth doing well eventually. It is very rarely worth doing first.
