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Avery Dennison Corporation
Avery Dennison makes the labels, packaging materials, tapes, and tracking tags that businesses stick on their products and use to move goods through supply chains.
Avery Dennison is the company behind a lot of the sticky stuff you never notice. Every time you peel a price sticker off a shirt, scan a barcode at checkout, or see a brand label on a bottle, there's a decent chance the material came from this company. It makes pressure-sensitive label materials — the fancy name for the adhesive-backed sheets that get printed and cut into stickers — along with packaging materials, tapes, and other bonding products. Its customers are mostly other businesses: label printers, consumer goods brands, food and beverage companies, pharmaceutical firms, and automakers.
The other big half of the business is retail and logistics tracking. Avery Dennison makes RFID tags — tiny electronic chips paired with antennas, printed on labels — that let stores and warehouses count inventory without scanning each item by hand. Wave a reader near a shelf and it can tally hundreds of items in seconds. That's a real problem for retailers who lose sales when products are out of stock or misplaced. The company also sells fasteners, embroidery, and branding products for apparel. The customers paying the bills are brands and retailers who want to know exactly what's on their shelves and where their shipments are. What makes Avery Dennison strong is that it sits in the boring middle of thousands of supply chains. Its label materials are a small cost for customers but a hassle to switch, because changing suppliers means re-testing how adhesives behave on different surfaces and printing equipment. That stickiness, plus the sheer volume of labels the world consumes, gives it steady recurring revenue. Competition is real — CCL Industries is a major rival in labels, and Zebra Technologies competes in tracking hardware — but Avery Dennison's scale and global footprint keep it near the top.
The company is headquartered in Mentor, Ohio, a quiet suburb east of Cleveland, which fits its low-profile style. It returns a lot of cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, and it has spent years buying smaller companies to expand in RFID and specialty materials, betting that smarter labels will keep growing as supply chains get more digital. One fun piece of history: the company traces back to R. Stanton Avery, who in the 1930s invented the first self-adhesive label and started making them in a garage — pretty much creating the industry it still leads today.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026