The company Dymo was founded in 1958 to commercialize personal label makers. The notion of neatly typed, adhesive, customizable, labels was an important innovation at the time: according to the company’s web site, Dymo´s first product, the Embosser, “quickly revolutionized the way business and individuals organized and identified their offices and surroundings.” A deeper reflection on such statement might suggest that organizing one’s work environment is not so much a matter of neatness as it is a way of increasing productivity. Dymo’s label makers were small contributors to the search for enhanced efficiency and task streamlining, essential aspects of mid 20th-century, capitalist, industrialized, societies such as the United States. Labeling everything in a consistent way introduced the notion of normative environments: the individualistic task of hand labeling was suddenly suppressed, and the adoption of the same labeling system for all the fellow workers became a metaphor for the unified, collective, effort that corporate management saw as essential to high profit-making. Dymos as instruments of corporate oppression? The paradox is that the first embossers were highly imperfect instruments: anyone who has used one knows that the same word embossed three times by three different individuals would look slightly different, depending on the force applied to embossing each one of the letters, or the way the space between the letters is set. The mechanical nature of Dymos insured a crafty, somehow personalized way to labeling, something that Dymo’s Embosser hardly conveys as an object.
