Avery Dennison

Avery Dennison is a global materials science company and one of the apparel industry's most important component suppliers: its pressure-sensitive labels, woven and printed garment labels, RFID tags and packaging go onto clothing sold by brands and retailers in nearly every major market. The company still trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AVY, the same ticker carried in its stock summaries from 2013 and 2020.

Company Profile

The apparel connection runs through the company's Retail Branding and Information Solutions work: the labels, tags, tickets and branding elements a shopper sees on a garment in store. Avery Dennison's February 2020 summary describes a business specialising in the design and manufacture of labelling and functional materials, with pressure-sensitive materials used in labelling and packaging alongside graphics, reflective and performance materials. For clothing brands, that makes the company a behind-the-scenes supplier whose products appear on millions of garments without carrying its name to the consumer.

Because the customer is the brand rather than the shopper, Avery Dennison's fortunes track global apparel volumes, brand demand for RFID inventory technology and retailers' investment in supply-chain visibility. Its scale — products used in nearly every major industry, from apparel to automotive and medical — sets it apart from the pure trim suppliers elsewhere in this section: it is a diversified materials company for which apparel labelling is a major, but not the only, market.

The range behind the name is pressure-sensitive label stock, woven and printed garment labels, RFID tags, tickets and packaging. Its customers are clothing brands and retailers in nearly every major market. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Avery Dennison in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Avery Dennison with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because Avery Dennison sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following label and materials demand across global clothing production. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.