White labels are used by some websites to facilitate a successful brand for offering its services

The name comes from the image of a white label made on the package wherein the marketer can put its trade dress. The origin dates back to vinyl records. At that time, DJs used to take out the label from a known record, concealing the actual source of that record from other DJs. In this way, they would create white label record.

In general, white label production is for generic electronics manufactured at a large scale, such as television sets and DVD players. A number of companies keep a sub-brand for their products and these brands are particularly used by them. For example, you can sell a DVD player model-A from brand-A, which is also sold as model-B by brand-B.

White-label software are used by some websites to facilitate a successful brand for offering its services without investing in the development of infrastructure and technology. To list a few examples, Amazon.co.uk ran Waterstones website until recently, while LoveFilm runs Tescos DVD Rental services. Several companies provide their store brand and supermarket private brand products to multiple supermarkets that change their labels. Besides, a few manufacturers produce generic brand labels at low-cost, with just the products name, like Cola.

Credit-card operations are occasionally outsourced by smaller banks to larger banks. The bigger bank charges fee from the smaller one to issue and process the credit cards as white label cards. This process of outsourcing enables smaller banks to give a brand name to the cards without spending on the infrastructure, which would else lead to excessive overhead.