Gary Burns Built a Business Around the Tiny Things Nobody Notices

A label is an exceptionally modest object. It asks for no applause. It sits on a bottle, a box or a pallet and does the administrative work of saying what the thing is. Gary Burns saw a larger job hiding in that small rectangle: the label could identify an item without line of sight, carry a unique digital identity and report its presence as it moved. The physical world, in other words, could become a little less forgetful.

Burns built his career in the difficult gap between that appealing idea and the factory floor. Radio-frequency identification sounds nearly magical when reduced to a diagram. A reader sends a signal. A tag responds. Data appears. In practice, materials interfere, antennas need tuning, frequencies vary, print and encoding must agree, and every customer has a different object in a different environment. The magic has tolerances.

His response favored a shorter distance between design, testing and manufacturing, with attention reserved for the tiny failures. That habit would carry him through two company launches, two acquisitions and a long partnership with fellow inventor Peter Phaneuf.

The engineer before the label

Burns earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering management from Western Michigan University, a useful pairing for someone who would spend his working life translating between machinery and markets. Before becoming an RFID founder, he accumulated more than two decades of international management experience. His public biography connects him to large projects including Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Concourse and a major mail-processing facility at Heathrow. He also held executive roles at Siemens and Avery Dennison.

Those projects operate at a scale where cheerful improvisation becomes expensive. Airports, mail facilities and automated systems reward repeatability. A process does not get credit for being right most of the time when the wrong item can travel miles before anyone notices. That concern with dependable identification would become the thread running through Burns’s entrepreneurial work.

First company, first exit

In 2004, Burns and Phaneuf founded RF IDentics in Grand Rapids. RFID was attracting serious attention, but cost and quality remained stubborn obstacles. Their answer was a vertically integrated operation that could design, test and manufacture inlays on site. An inlay is the working heart of an RFID label: antenna, chip and substrate, assembled so that an ordinary object can answer a reader.

The team worked on antenna designs and manufacturing methods, earning patents and competing with much larger global suppliers. By 2006, its UHF tags had earned top marks in independent Generation 2 performance testing. The company also worked with printed antennas designed to function across European and American frequency environments. Burns’s language at the time was revealingly severe.

We are zealots about quality.

That five-word line is a compact operating system. RFID tags are bought in volume and scattered across real supply chains. One defective unit can become a missing record, a confused inventory count or an exception that requires a person to investigate. Quality becomes practical when the product’s entire purpose is reliable recognition.

Late in 2006, Avery Dennison acquired RF IDentics. The deal gave Avery access to patented manufacturing processes and gave the Grand Rapids operation the reach of a global materials company. Burns said at the time that the two businesses shared a view of RFID inlays becoming integrated into packaging. In the future he described, identification would become part of the object’s skin.

The sequel was built by the same cast

A sale often puts a neat period at the end of a founder story. Burns and Phaneuf used a semicolon. In 2009, the pair and members of their design and engineering team started eAgile as an independent company. The continuity matters because the returning group knew exactly which RFID problems remained irritating.

One was serialization. A tag might work perfectly as a radio device and still be part of a broken system if its identifier, printed serial number, barcode and database record did not match. eAgile developed a validation process intended to keep those elements synchronized and prevent duplication. It is the sort of infrastructure work that disappears when successful. Nobody celebrates the database row that agrees with the label. They only notice the one that does not.

The company expanded beyond inlays into labels, readers, software and complete RFID infrastructure. In 2011, it acquired a specialist labeling business, strengthening its work in pharmaceutical packaging and other controlled supply chains. Its Grand Rapids footprint eventually grew to 40,000 square feet with testing and demonstration areas. Products traveled to more than 40 countries. The little label had developed a large passport.

Near, far and the phone in your pocket

Burns’s public explanations of RFID tend to begin with what a customer can do, not with the pleasure of the technology itself. UHF lets a reader identify multiple tagged items from a distance, useful on production lines and in distribution. NFC works at close range and can be read by a compatible phone, useful when one person wants to interact with one product. eAgile’s DualWing family combined both frequencies in a single inlay.

The design joins two moments that companies usually treat separately. The first is operational: where is the item, and did it pass through the expected checkpoint? The second is personal: is this the product I think it is, and what can I do with it? Burns described the object’s role with a wonderfully plain invitation: “Here I am and do you want to interact with me.” The package becomes a quiet host.

eAgile extended the same logic to eSeal, placing an RFID inlay within a cap-and-seal construction, and to eLink, which tied product authentication to visibility and digital engagement. Burns also made an unfashionable point as talk of the Internet of Things grew airy: “The Internet of Things requires print.” Clouds may be virtual. Products are still physical. Someone has to put identity onto them.

A factory is a form of honesty

Burns’s career offers a useful correction to the mythology of frictionless technology. RFID lives in friction. It touches adhesive, foil, plastic, liquid, cardboard, metal, printers, readers and enterprise software. Each layer can ruin the elegant idea above it. Keeping a factory, lab and software capability close to one another creates an environment where claims can be tested against stubborn matter.

It also explains the durability of his partnership with Phaneuf. Public patent records repeatedly pair their names, often alongside colleagues Michael Isabell and Patrick Hornacek. The inventions range from electronic labels and container seals to a portal combining RFID reading with object recognition. The collaborative engineering was filed in careful diagrams and then pushed toward production, far from the lone-genius theater of an inventor staring at a napkin.

In April 2023, CCL Industries bought eAgile for $54 million, including deferred consideration. The company became CCL eAgile within CCL Healthcare, joining a much larger global packaging organization. It was Burns and Phaneuf’s second acquisition together, nineteen years after they opened RF IDentics.

The arc is satisfyingly circular. Avery bought the first company because its inlay processes and intellectual property mattered. The founders returned because the larger systems around RFID still needed work. CCL bought the second company after it had turned that work into an integrated operation spanning print, hardware, software and data. Burns kept following the label until the label became a system.

The overlooked layer

There is an appealing modesty to building at the point where digital records meet physical goods. The work is rarely the star of an advertisement. It simply makes other promises possible: inventory that reflects a shelf, a package that can identify itself, a serialized number that agrees everywhere it appears.

Burns did not invent the ambition to make objects legible to computers. His contribution has been the patient industrialization of that ambition - the antenna tuned, the tag tested, the code matched, the read validated, the process repeated. He chose a field where success often looks like nothing happening at all. The correct item moves. The correct record follows. The label keeps its tiny appointment with reality.