How Airlines Brand Their Inflight Products: OEM and Customization Options Explained

Ask any two buyers what "customized" means on an inflight product order and you will get two different answers. One is thinking about a printed logo, the other about a specific tray color, and a third might mean a completely different size than what is pictured in the catalog. All three are real requests, and a manufacturer taking an OEM or ODM order handles each of them separately. Walking through how a supplier's own catalog documents customization shows why treating all three as one single "customized, please" request causes confusion at the quoting stage.

OEM and ODM, in Plain Terms

OEM (original equipment manufacturer) work means a factory builds a product to a buyer's own specification and branding, whether that spec is entirely new or a variation on something already in production. ODM (original design manufacturer) work means the buyer instead starts from a design the manufacturer already owns, a catalog item like ours, and finishes it with their own branding, color, or size rather than commissioning an original design from scratch. In practice, most inflight-product sourcing sits closer to the ODM end: an airline picks a tray, a blanket or a cutlery pack that is already in production and asks for its own branding to be applied, rather than paying for a bespoke mold or tooling run from a blank sheet of paper.

Branding Method Is Its Own Line Item

The most visible form of customization is how a logo actually gets applied to the item, and a supplier's own spec sheet usually names the method rather than leaving it generic. Printing and embossing cover the largest share of our own catalog: embossing shows up on rotable tableware like the rotable tableware set and on serveware like the water jug, while printing covers everything from disposable cutlery packs to paper cups. Engraving is the metal-specific option, used on stainless steel cutlery where a printed logo would not hold up to repeated washing. Embroidery and jacquard weave are the textile equivalents, used on soft-goods lines like the duvet and the acrylic blanket respectively, and decal is reserved for delicate surfaces like the bone chinaware fan and leaf pieces, where embossing or engraving is not practical. Hangtag branding — a printed tag rather than a mark applied directly to the item — turns up on soft-sided pieces like the bread basket, where neither embossing nor a direct print sits well on the material.

Color Is a Separate Axis From Branding

Choosing how a logo is applied does not automatically fix the item's color, and our own Atlas ABS tray family is a clear example of the two being specified independently: the Inflight ABS Atlas Tray and its half-size and full-size siblings each list a set of stock colors — red, black, gray — plus a custom-color option, on top of their own embossed-or-printed branding line. A buyer ordering Atlas trays is really making two separate decisions on the same spec sheet: which branding method, and which color, not one combined "look" picked off a single swatch.

Size Can Be Customized Too, on Select Lines

A third, less obvious axis is size itself. Several lines in our comfort-amenity and tableware range — the acrylic blanket, the duvet, the bone chinaware fan and the hot towel among them — are specified in the catalog as available in a customized size rather than one fixed dimension, meaning the base item is made to an airline's own measurements rather than supplied off a single standard cut. That is a genuinely different request from asking for a different color or branding method, and it is worth specifying separately rather than assuming a catalog photo represents the only size on offer.

Customization Is Already Built Into How We List Every Product

This is not a special-order footnote bolted onto a handful of items: every product listing in our catalog carries its own OEM/ODM question and answer covering logo branding, size and material variants on request, precisely because the three axes above apply, in some combination, to nearly everything we manufacture. A buyer working through a multi-item quote can expect the same three questions to come up on every line, not just the ones that happen to look customizable in a photo.

Specify All Three, Not Just "Customized"

• Branding method: printing, embossing, engraving, embroidery, jacquard weave, decal or hangtag, chosen for the material
• Color: a catalog default plus, on select lines like the Atlas tray family, a custom-color option
• Size: made-to-order on select comfort-amenity and tableware lines rather than a single fixed dimension
• All three can be requested together on one OEM/ODM order without commissioning an entirely new product

None of the three axes above requires redesigning the base product. An airline can keep an existing tray, blanket or cutlery pack exactly as engineered and change only the branding method, the color, or the size to fit its own service. Our Meal Service and Comfort Amenity categories carry the full range of items these customization options apply to.