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The parent who labels their kids’ lunch boxes and water bottles is the parent who can change the world—or, at least, their world. For a one-time, nominal cost, labels can bring needed organization to cluttered corners of the kitchen, help your kid and their teacher spot objects with ease, and ensure that often-pricey goods don’t end up in the lost and found. Thermal Printer Roll
After sticking, washing, and wearing down 11 kinds of printed labels and one write-on label, we found that Name Bubbles Custom School Supply Labels are the best printed labels to put on kids gear while Avery No-Iron Fabric Labels are the best for kids clothes.
We looked for labels that stick to what you need them to for as long as you need them to.
Our picks are easy to apply—no irons necessary.
Selecting labels should be straightforward, and they should arrive fairly quickly, even during back-to-school season.
Two of our picks stand apart because of their fun design options.
These easy-to-design labels are durable: In our tests, they showed no signs of wear or tear after 60-plus washes. But like other labels of this type, they’re not the best choice to stick directly on clothing.
Name Bubbles labels are fun to design, easy to apply, and the sturdiest of the labels we tested. Adhered to metal bento boxes, plastic lunch boxes, plastic water bottles, and folders, they don’t peel or deteriorate. The labels are sold in packs of different shapes and sizes, offering a nice assortment depending on what you’re looking to label. While Name Bubbles does make labels specifically intended for clothing, we recommend going with the cheaper Avery No-Iron Fabric Labels, our also-great choice, if you need to label clothes and reserving the waterproof name labels for hard-surface items.
These labels are well designed and don’t unstick. The ordering process and packaging are a little less polished in comparison with Name Bubbles, but the product itself is pretty much the same.
Label Daddy uses the same adhesive in its labels as Name Bubbles, and its label pack comes close in almost every way to our top pick. The design options and ordering experience are straightforward, though at times the Label Daddy website can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re starting from scratch. (It has so many options!) Once you make your way to your choice, you can’t go wrong: Label Daddy’s labels stuck just as well as those of Name Bubbles.
These write-on labels are perfect for identifying clothes: They stick on collars, tags, and even rougher fabrics, and they don’t budge or smudge.
Avery’s No-Iron Fabric Labels may not bring the same immediate joy as a personalized label with unicorns and rainbows, but maybe they should. The most affordable of the options we’ve tested, these fabric labels stick to clothes (tags and the fabric itself), and they also adhere to lunch boxes and water bottles as well as any printed label we tested. Yes, a Sharpie is required to bring them to life, but in the end they get the job done for a low price.
These easy-to-design labels are durable: In our tests, they showed no signs of wear or tear after 60-plus washes. But like other labels of this type, they’re not the best choice to stick directly on clothing.
These labels are well designed and don’t unstick. The ordering process and packaging are a little less polished in comparison with Name Bubbles, but the product itself is pretty much the same.
These write-on labels are perfect for identifying clothes: They stick on collars, tags, and even rougher fabrics, and they don’t budge or smudge.
We’ve been reviewing labels for kids clothing and gear since 2017, tracking how they hold up—and hold on—to everything from water bottles to headlamps to jackets over years of use. For this updated guide, we spent hours researching custom labels, as well as other, similar options.
I’m a journalist with 15 years of experience under my belt, including seven years with kids in tow. I’ve worked on parenting content and products through the years and somehow managed to shepherd two kids and their belongings through preschool, kindergarten, summer camp, and international trips with merely a Sharpie. With the arrival of my third child and this assignment, I learned firsthand the simple joys of labels. Consider me a convert.
Many childcare facilities, schools, and camps require that you label any object your child brings with them: water bottles, lunch boxes, backpacks, pencil cases, folders, sleeves of diapers. Although a Sharpie works fine on both hard-surface items and fabrics, more often than not, it will require a rewrite over the months and years. Personalized labels aren’t necessary by any means, but they can make the slog of bulk-identifying a little more fun.
If you’re the parent of more than one kiddo (or plan to be down the line), consider including just your child’s last name. It will save you money, some sibling bickering in the wee hours of the morning when everyone’s getting out the door, and a headache when it comes time to pass down items from one kid to the next.
Labels are not simply for small children. They can also be handy for workplaces (think fridges with shared lunches, lactation rooms, planners and notebooks when every employee has the same company swag), eldercare settings like nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, gyms, and yoga studios.
After consulting with parents, caregivers, and teachers and digging through product sites, customer reviews, and parenting forums, we focused our assessment and testing of labels on several key features:
Durability and stickability: Do the labels stick to what you need them to, and will they stick for as long as you need them to? Most personalized labels use the same 3M Controltac paper and tout the same durability: They’re waterproof and dishwasher- and microwave-safe. Some brands claim that their personalized labels work on clothing and clothing tags just as well as on hard surfaces, but we’ve found that nearly all fail in the end to withstand regular washes.
Ease of use: Given that labels fall into the simple-pleasures category of purchases, it’s important that they are, well, simple. Iron-on and stamp options are available, but we don’t recommend them considering how easy and dependable stick-on labels are as an option.
Design and ordering experience: Part of the appeal of labels is the delightful design. Your kid may recognize the toy truck, tie-dye colors, or Pokémon character on the sticker before they recognize their own name. And bright colors can go a long way when you’re trying to grab-and-go from a sea of Thermoses, CamelBaks, and L.L.Beans. The sheer assortment of designs to choose from can feel overwhelming, but once you’ve identified what you want, the design process should be easy.
Cost: Every label company we researched had a whopping number of label packages—different assortments based on size, shape, quantity, and color to fit every object a kid could possibly hold in their hand. We broke it down to cost-per-sticker.
Delivery time: Labels should ideally arrive in a matter of days, even during back-to-school season.
Over the past six years, we’ve tested and retested personalized labels from 11 companies, as well as a write-on label and a fabric stamp.
After going through the design and ordering process, we put the labels to work for our families. We placed them on hard surfaces and clothing to see how they fared through washes, small-finger picking, trips to school and after-school activities, visits to the playground and museums, and more.
These easy-to-design labels are durable: In our tests, they showed no signs of wear or tear after 60-plus washes. But like other labels of this type, they’re not the best choice to stick directly on clothing.
Name Bubbles labels continue to be our top pick after a second round of in-depth testing in 2022 and 2023. The designs are bright and eye-catching, the ordering process is simple as can be, and the labels themselves have shown no signs of wear or tear after more than 60 washes in the dishwasher, many trips to school, and endless time in my 4- and 7-year-old’s hands. Name Bubbles also offers the best and quickest ordering experience—essential for procrastinating parents like myself.
The ordering process is fun. You can take a (truly unscientific) “find your perfect pack” quiz that directs you to assortments like daycare packs or camp packs. We tested the Custom School Supply Labels pack, which we recommend for its variety of sticker sizes.
And the labels arrive quickly. Our cactus-theme labels took just two days to arrive in the mail and came in an envelope marked with clear directions. We were reminded to allow the labels to set for 24 hours before sending them out in the wild—or microwaving, washing, or freezing them.
But like other personalized labels, they don’t hold up well on fabric. The clothing-specific labels work fine on jackets and pieces that get washed less frequently. However, in our most recent testing, when stuck directly on fabric they came off after the first wash (a regular cycle with warm water), and they stayed on the tags for only four or five washes.
Supervising editor Tracy Vence has had a better experience with Name Bubbles’s clothing labels—only some of them had begun to lift off of clothing that had been washed and dried numerous times over more than a year and a half—but if you’re planning to label a lot of clothes, we recommend the fabric-specific Avery labels.
The only downside to Name Bubbles is the email marketing that follows your purchase. Unless you’re a professional label collector, you’ll probably want to unsubscribe right away. The bombardment of discounts and seasonal label promotions overwhelmed us. But it’s a good reminder that this company—like all of the personalized-label brands we tried—is constantly running deals. Be sure to find a code to use on your order; they’re typically right on the homepage.
These labels are well designed and don’t unstick. The ordering process and packaging are a little less polished in comparison with Name Bubbles, but the product itself is pretty much the same.
Label Daddy uses the same 3M adhesive that Name Bubbles and other personalized labels we tested do, and we found that its labels stick just as well to hard objects and also come in tons of fun designs. (My 4-year-old, who’s on a major tie-dye kick, won’t use a lunch box without her tie-dye name on it at this point.) The ordering and shipping process is a notch less seamless, though.
The site can be a tad overwhelming, but the design process is simple. Label Daddy’s website, which can be a bit intimidating to navigate, is organized into holiday, school, kids, and camp categories. We recommend making your way to the Starter School Pack, which includes all-purpose labels in four sizes. The design process is simple. And you get reassurance after you enter your information that “A Label Daddy expert will ensure that the spacing and alignment is perfect on your labels.”
Delivery doesn’t seem quite as smooth. Our tie-dye labels arrived in just a few days (another quick turnaround) in a sleeve similar to that of Name Bubbles. But another editor experienced a two-week delay, which is notable. The overall experience was a little less polished: The packing slip seemed a bit print-at-home, and the directions were all-around less clear on what goes where.
They stick slightly better to clothing. Label Daddy fared the best of the personalized labels we tested in terms of staying put on fabric. The label didn’t come off in washes when adhered to either a clothing tag or the inside of a collar on a kid’s cotton shirt. It did, however, come off many times when adhered to a sample cotton napkin alongside other labels. Senior editor Kalee Thompson says Label Daddy’s labels have withstood washes on jackets, sweatshirts, and swimwear; labels she applied over a year ago on rash guards are just where she placed them last spring. That said, we’d still advise going with Avery’s labels if labeling clothing is your priority.
These write-on labels are perfect for identifying clothes: They stick on collars, tags, and even rougher fabrics, and they don’t budge or smudge.
Avery’s No-Iron Fabric Labels may not have the sparkle and shine (or Pokémon design options) of personalized labels, but they’re our favorite workhorse: the label that shows up to get the job done. We recommend these Avery labels for all fabric labeling, including on clothes and cloth lunch boxes. They also work great on hard-surface items like water bottles and storage containers.
They’re a bit more work, but they cost much less. You have to take the extra step of writing with a marker (Avery recommends a Sharpie for best results, as do we), but the manual labor is worth it for the sturdiness and cost: They are by far the cheapest option of the labels we tested.
The seal is extra strong. The material itself feels much thinner to the touch than other labels we tested, but when applied to fabrics—including cotton and canvas—it adheres with the strongest seal and is sturdy as can be. It does leave a strip of adhesive residue if you pull the labels off objects and fabrics, so consider these labels to be permanent additions.
The pack offers several shapes and sizes. We found that the assortment of small sizes and shapes in each sheet of blank labels works well for kids stuff, although a fine-point permanent marker is necessary for legibility. Senior staff writer Jackie Reeve, who has been using these Avery labels on her daughter’s clothing and other items for years, reports that they stick excellently to everything except socks.
These Avery labels are ideal, too, for someone who wants a step above the Sharpie-on-fabric experience. We’ve become a family that keeps a sheet of Avery’s labels in a drawer in our kitchen, there at the ready if a child is bringing a new item to school at the last minute.
The label packs we considered from InchBug, including the Pee Wee Combo Pack we tested, cost the most per label. And while the campground motif was our favorite design in the end, the step-by-step online process, which generates an image of your personalized label that looks far from real, left us feeling less confident at checkout. InchBug also offers reusable Orbit Labels, which slip on and off bottles.
We found that Stuck On You labels didn’t adhere as well to hard surfaces as other labels we tried, and they took more than three weeks to arrive.
The Oliver’s Labels Starter Package was a strong contender, offering labels made with the same adhesive film as our top pick and our runner-up. But we preferred the shapes, sizes, and design options of our picks. Oliver’s Labels does give you the choice of including a special link to the company’s website that allows someone who finds a lost item to contact you, without your having to print a real phone number or email if you are worried about privacy. This can put more of a burden on the finder of the lost item, however. And you can accomplish the same thing with a Google Voice number on any of our picks.
Mabel’s Labels are known to have been used by celebrity parents like Gwyneth Paltrow and Heidi Klum. They were one of two contenders that didn’t stick well to the nylon lunch box we used for testing, however.
Minted’s labels are designed by independent artists, and they look really cool. They stayed put on most materials we tested, including nylon, but the labels we chose were not sized well for applying to clothing tags and ultimately melted in the dryer. The company sells labels of different sizes separately (including ones that fit on a clothing tag), but it doesn’t have the convenient pack options that other companies offer.
The designs on Tinyme’s labels are adorable. But the package took seven business days to arrive, the clothing labels are iron-on only and didn’t stay fully adhered through more than half a dozen washes, and the stick-on labels didn’t stick to a nylon lunch box for long.
A fun alternative for those looking to label clothes is TheNameStamp. The personalized stamp is a cinch to use and works fairly well on light-color clothes. In the end, though, we found the print too small and the ink too smudge-prone to recommend it over the simplicity of labels.
Erica Pearson contributed reporting in 2017 and 2018.
This article was edited by Rachel Hurn and Kalee Thompson.
Lauren Sullivan is Wirecutter’s director of audience, overseeing search, social, newsletter, and all the ways readers can find our journalists’ best-in-class coverage. It’s the coolest of jobs. Before Wirecutter, while raising two kids in an 800-square-foot shoebox, Lauren helped newsrooms (NBC News, The Huffington Post) and brands (LearnVest, Etsy) develop editorial strategies. She has since upgraded to a Philly row home and a third kid, but she still carries that minimalist mindset with her. (She has never owned a microwave.)
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