Brand Labels — Washcare, Hangtag, and Carton

Under the Labels tab, a Brand holds three label designs — Washcare, Hangtag and Carton. Each shows as a live preview with its own Design button; together they're the artwork that prints onto every garment and box you produce for that brand. Design them once here and every Tech Pack and production batch reuses them — the typography, the spacing, the exact placement of care symbols and composition all carry the brand, without redrawing anything per style.

A brand's labels are part of its identity, not a generic template, so they're worth setting up deliberately. Click Design on any of the three to open the Label Designer — a visual, drag-and-drop editor — and lay the label out exactly as it should print.

Designing a label

The designer is a canvas that mirrors the real label: a tool rail down the left, the label itself with rulers in the center, and a properties panel on the right for whatever you've selected.

Add elements from the left rail:

Text — a fixed line of text, e.g. Made in Paraguay.
Field — a value pulled from your data (size, composition, …). See Pulling in data below.
Box — a rectangle or border.
Image — a logo or graphic; paste a URL or upload a file.
Barcode — a scannable code. See Barcodes below.

Once something is on the canvas:

Drag to move it; drag the handles to resize. Hold Shift and click — or drag a box around several — to multi-select and move or align them together.
Double-click a text box to edit it right on the label; press Enter for a new line and click away (or Esc) to finish. Double-clicking a field, barcode or image opens its settings instead.
With an element selected, the right panel sets its exact position and size in millimetres, plus font, size, bold / italic / underline and alignment. The small × at the corner deletes it.
Set a font and size once, then use Apply to all so every text matches — labels read best when the type is consistent.

Click Save when you're done. The preview on the Brand updates immediately and the design is ready to print.

Tip: the designer follows your desk's light/dark theme and remembers the last font and size you used, so new text stays consistent.

Page sizing

A label has to print at its true physical size, so set the page first. With nothing selected, the right panel shows Page Settings: choose a preset (e.g. Care label · 40 × 60) or type an exact width and height in millimetres. Everything you place is measured in mm too, so what you lay out is what prints.

Get the size right before you design — if you change it afterwards, elements keep their mm coordinates while the canvas reshapes around them.

Tip: run a test print on the actual label stock before you rely on a new size, and set your label printer's page to match with no margins so the design prints edge-to-edge.

Pulling in data (the database)

A label is mostly dynamic — the size, composition and barcode change with every garment. Rather than typing them, you bind an element to your data and GarmentFlow fills it in when the label prints.

Click Field (the database icon) to open the picker. The quick-insert chips are grouped by where the data lives — Fabric, Tech Pack, the Size / Variant row, Production Batch, Customer — so you never hunt for fieldnames. There are two kinds:

Fields (blue pill, field icon) are single values — Size, Variant, Model name, Customer name.
Lists (orange pill, list icon) expand a whole set of rows — Composition (e.g. "95% Cotton · 5% Elastane"), Care symbols (the wash-care icons) and Care instructions (the text). For a list you can choose Inline (wrap on one flow) or New row each, matching how the brand lays it out.

When a label prints for a production batch, GarmentFlow looks up that batch — and its tech pack, fabric, brand, matched size/variant row and customer — and drops the real values into place. So the size becomes XL, composition becomes the fabric's actual fibre mix, and the care symbols become that fabric's wash-care icons. You design the template once; the data is always current.

Text can also be marked Translate, so standard words like Composition and Wash Care print in the chosen language automatically.

Barcodes

Add a Barcode element and bind it to the code you scan — usually the Barcode on the Size / Variant row, the EAN‑13 generated on the Tech Pack registry. Pick the format in the properties panel (CODE128, EAN13, …); for most retail labels that's EAN13. At print, GarmentFlow renders the real barcode for each size — if the registry already holds a barcode image it's used as‑is, otherwise the code is rendered to a barcode. Size it generously and leave a little quiet space around it so scanners read it cleanly. For where these codes come from, see Registry and barcodes.

Reuse: import, export, defaults

Beside each Design button are small import and export icons. Export downloads a design as a file you can back up or hand to another brand; Import loads one in. A brand with no design yet starts from a default template, so you're never facing a blank label — adjust it, save, and it becomes that brand's own.