A quick look at any of our packaging reveals a missing element that most are accustomed to seeing: a bar code. There is the QR code, that odd square with dots, but more on that later. For a bit of context, what is a bar code?
What is a Bar Code, and what drove its development?
The origin of the barcode goes back to the 1940s when Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, two graduate students at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, came up with the idea of a system of printed patterns that machines could read. Their invention was inspired by Morse code, which uses a series of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers.
However, it was in the 1970s that the barcode began to gain widespread use in the retail industry. This boost was due to the development of the Universal Product Code (UPC), a standardized barcode system that retailers in the United States adopted.
The driver for the barcode's widespread adoption was the need for a more efficient and accurate way to manage inventory and sales data in the retail industry across brands and manufacturers. Before the barcode, retailers relied on manual data entry. Also, the need for a uniform and unique numbering system made tracking similar products from different manufacturers easier. The barcode provided a faster, more reliable way to collect and manage data and inventory at scale, which helped retailers to improve their operations and reduce costs.
Why Slippery Elephant relies on the QR code
While the bar code is an excellent tool for retail trade, especially in the paradigm of larger retailers that stock merchandise from a wide selection of manufacturers, Slippery Elephant approached this from a "customer first" perspective and challenged the need for the bar code given our direct to customer model. Like all decisions, we have prioritized a direct relationship with our customers over selling in bulk through traditional retail channels. With this guiding principle in mind, we choose instead to use a QR code with a link directly back to our website. Unlike physical retail use of bar codes, the QR code is for you, the customer, and us. It provides customers a direct link to the site to contact us, reorder and provide valuable feedback, helping inform future creations and improvements to our current products.