White-label product

Common use

White label production is often used for mass-produced generic products including electronics, consumer products and software packages such as DVD players, televisions, and web applications. Some companies maintain a sub-brand for their goods. For example, in the United Kingdom, the same model of DVD player may be sold by Dixons as a Saisho and by Currys as a Matsui, which are brands exclusively used by those companies.

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. Many IT and modern marketing companies outsource or use white-label companies and services to provide specialist services without having to invest in developing their own product.

Most supermarket 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 ("Beer", "Cola", etc.). Richelieu Foods, for example, is a private label food manufacturing company producing frozen pizza, salad dressing, sauces, marinades, condiments, and deli salads for other companies, including Hy-Vee, Aldi, Save A Lot, Sam's Club,{{cite web

Business-to-Business (B2B) marketplaces offer Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) that make products sold under the buyer's brand, which is what white-label production entails. In this case, the brand owner uses its own distribution network and marketing skills to sell the product. Chinese marketplaces like Alibaba.com and Made-in-China enable buyers to create specialized products that can be labelled by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The garment industry is an example where customization and equipment sharing support the OEM/ODM requirements of buyers.

Smaller banks sometimes outsource their credit card or check processing operations to larger banks, which issue and process 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 necessary infrastructure. For example, Cuscal Limited provides white-label card and transactional products to credit unions in Australia; Simple issued bank accounts and debit cards operated by The Bancorp Bank and BBVA Compass in the United States.

In Southern California, City National Bank is the largest check processor in that half of the state, because in addition to checks issued by its own customers, CNB processed checks for the customers of more than 60 smaller Southern California banks.

Many software companies offer white-label software to agencies or other customers, including the possibility to resell the software under the customer's brand. This typically requires functionalities such as the adaptation of the software's visual appearance, multi-customer management and automatic billing to the end-customers based on usage parameters.

References

References

1. "White Label Product". Investopedia.
2. Drew Gainor. (June 3, 2014). "Why A White Label Solution Is Easier Than Building Your Own". Forbes.
3. "What Is a White Label Product, and How Does It Work?".
4. Evan Blass. (July 16, 2012). "Can HTC avoid past mistakes in its latest incarnation?". Mashable.
5. Sean Hollister. (May 16, 2012). "Ubitus GameCloud: the white-label cloud gaming service seeking a US audience". The Verge.
6. Alka Katwala. (September 2009). "Fade to White: Trade-Finance White Labels as Part of a Growth Strategy". jpmorganchase.com.
7. Tarasov, Katie. (October 12, 2022). "How Amazon's big private-label business is growing and leaving small brands to protect against knockoffs".
8. "Design Management Capability Framework in Global Value Chains: Integrating the Functional Upgrading Theory from OEM to ODM and OBM".
9. Lüthje, Boy. (2022). "China’s Industrial Internet: Platform-Based Manufacturing and Restructuring of Value Chains". Springer Nature.
10. "Simple: The Bancorp Bank Privacy Practices".
11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/06/01/how-white-label-saas-platforms-are-powering-the-software-economy/{{Dead link. (August 2025)