Smart manufacturing produces smart labels efficiently
6 August 2026 
A London start-up has come up with a low-cost smart label technology that tracks items continuously, broadcasting their location constantly. There has been considerable demand for the technology – which could replace barcodes or QR codes – requiring the company to adopt advanced automation technologies to boost its output.
Every day, around 1.7 million packages are lost or stolen. Traditional tracking methods rely on barcodes or QR codes, scanned at specific points, but offer little visibility between stops. Enter Reelables, a UK start-up that is redefining logistics with Bluetooth and 5G smart labels that provide real-time tracking from warehouse to doorstep. To meet growing demand, Reelables has recently increased its production speeds.
The company was founded by an entrepreneur called Brian Krejcarek who, when he was climbing up a hill one day, realised that he’d forgotten his Chapstick. This incident evolved into a vision: what if there was a way to track objects actively and to know what you’re missing before you leave home?
Originally imagined as a business-to-consumer (B2C) concept, the idea pivoted to a become a business-to-business (B2B) model targeting the huge opportunity in sectors such as freight forwarding, logistics and warehousing.
The company’s goal was to create a tracking label that was so low-cost and scalable, it could be attached to almost anything – eventually replacing traditional barcodes or QR codes with active trackers that constantly broadcast their location.
Today, Reelables produces two main types of smart label: Bluetooth tracking labels, which are ideal for high-value logistics where delay costs are significant; and temperature-sensitive labels, that are accurate to 0.5°C and are aimed at cold-chain applications such as seafood logistics.
Unlike its competitors, Reelables’ labels – similar in shape and size to a credit card – come on reels that can be integrated into automated label application processes, replacing traditional paper or plastic labels entirely.
In 2019, a mechatronics engineer, Oliver Boswall-Perks, joined Reelables, and was tasked with developing the company’s manufacturing capabilities. “Reelables is the only company producing labels that have an integrated printed battery,” he explains. “There are several advantages to this. First, our smart labels are categorised as packaging, meaning that they don’t need to be declared at customs. And, second, the labels can pass through standard waste streams, aligning with the sustainability goals of our customers.”
Boswall-Perks reached out to Beckhoff, who he had worked with previously. “Reelables approached us with a great proof-of-concept – a smart Bluetooth label that was gaining popularity in the industry – but their early production set-up wasn’t built for scale,” recalls Beckhoff’s UK business development manager, Bradley McEwan. “They needed to shift from a manual process using non-industrial hardware, to a fully-automated, high-speed manufacturing line.”
Up until this point, Reelables had been producing thousands of labels in a ten-hour shift. As demand grew, it built up its system, layer by layer, always aiming to increase speed and throughput, and improve quality.
“It was a classic chicken-and-egg scenario,” McEwan explains. “You need a product to go to market, but you can’t invest heavily in production infrastructure until there’s demand. As the company’s labels started to sell well, it became clear that they needed a fully automated system that could grow with them.”
The collaboration started with a meeting at Reelables’ London site. Beckhoff looked at the company’s set-up, and asked the team what it was hoping to achieve. From this, it engineered a new system using a series of discrete manufacturing modules to which automation software could be added.
The new system is built on an integrated TwinCat and EtherCat platform that incorporates various Beckhoff hardware and software components, including industrial PCs, drives, real-time vision systems, HMI touchscreens, and displays.
Reelables was an early adopter of Beckhoff’s integrated TwinCat Vision and Motion technology. The system runs on the Software Platform Toolkit (SPT) Framework – the first deployment of its kind in the UK. This architecture supports easy expansion and integration of future machines, making it extremely scalable. The framework provides a structured, modular approach to machine sequencing, and complies with PackML.
“What really made the difference was that Beckhoff wasn’t just selling us hardware,” Boswall-Perks recalls. “They helped create the whole system – vision, motion, logic – all working together. That level of support is rare, especially for a company of our size.”
Reelables engineer Oliver Boswall-Perks monitors the automated production line, which can produce tens of thousands of smart labels per shiftBeckhoff product engineer, Chris Knight, led the programming effort, working with the Reelables team over several months to develop the machine code, logic and sequencing.
“With a small team of just ten people, Chris’ insight was invaluable,” Boswall-Perks recalls. “He brought deep expertise that accelerated our progress and helped the team quickly get to grips with the system. He played a key role in mentoring us and connecting us with Beckhoff’s wider network of motion and vision experts, which massively sped up the process.”
The TwinCat Vision system plays a critical role in quality control. It captures high-resolution images of each label as it moves along the line, calculating precise rotational and positional offsets, checking for defects, and ensuring that glue is dispensed with micron-level accuracy. It also flags and skips labels that would fail further downstream.
The system can capture images of multiple labels simultaneously, enabling faster processing and greater consistency. This allows Reelables to maintain quality at high speeds. It now produces tens of thousands of labels per shift – a 150% increase on its previous system.
“Switching to TwinCat meant that we could integrate real-time vision into the process – something that we relied on humans for before,” says Boswall-Perks. “Now, not only is it faster, but the quality hasn’t dropped at all. In fact, it’s more consistent.”
Reelables is building full digital records of every label, with data captured at multiple checkpoints in the production process. This feeds into an AI-driven analytics system that predicts the risk of failure, based on dispensing quality, chip placement, substrate condition, environmental factors and more. The system can take real-time corrective actions – such as skipping chip placement or epoxy – thus reducing waste, improving yield, and saving time.
A next-generation vision system is also being implemented, with multiple cameras deployed across key inspection stations, all managed by one industrial PC. This infrastructure supports machine-learning models that will soon classify failures as manufacturing or field-related, closing the loop between production and real-world performance.
To cater for growing demand, Reelables is scaling production with two new compact lines, and a high-throughput system designed to produce tens of thousands of labels per hour. Three of the four core machines have already been built or engineered, positioning Reelables to increase its manufacturing capacity dramatically, and to cut lead times.
“We are now prepared for our next phase of growth, and everything that comes beyond that,” Boswall-Perks concludes.
