White-label product

A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it.

The name derives from the image of a white label on the packaging which can be filled in with the marketer's trade dress. Its origins can be traced back to vinyl records when DJs would remove the label from a popular record so other DJs would not be able to know who made the track. Doing this would create what was known as a white label record.

White label production is often used for mass-produced generic electronics such as DVD players and televisions. Some companies maintain a sub-brand for their goods, for example the same model of DVD player may be sold by Dixons as a "Matsui" and by Currys as a "Saisho", which are brands exclusively used by those companies. [Katwala, Alka. [http://www.jpmorganchase.com/cm/ContentServer?cid=1102380202104&pagename=jpmorgan%2Fts%2FTS_Content%2FGeneral&c=TS_Content "Fade to White: Trade-Finance White Labels as Part of a Growth Strategy"] , JP Morgan Chase, "Trade Review", September 2004.]

Some websites use white labels to enable a successful brand to offer a service without having to invest in creating the technology and infrastructure itself. For instance until recently, the website of Waterstone's was run by Amazon.co.uk and the DVD Rental services of Tesco are run by LoveFilm.

Most supermarket private brand or store brand products are provided by companies that sell to multiple supermarkets, changing only the labels. In addition some manufacturers create low-cost generic brand labels with only the name of the product ("Cola").

The space engineering company White Label Space also claims to be preparing a space mission as a white label product/service. [ [http://whitelabelspace.blogspot.com/ White Label Space] ]

Smaller banks sometimes outsource their credit-card operations to larger banks. The larger bank issues and processes the credit cards as white label cards, typically for a fee, allowing the smaller bank to brand the cards as their own without having to invest in the significant infrastructure that would otherwise be required.

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