Bespoke NFC housings & enclosures
If you are putting an NFC tag inside a product, the housing is not packaging — it is part of the antenna's environment. Get it wrong and the tag reads at 5 mm instead of 40, or not at all. Most of the NFC enclosure work that comes to us arrives after that has already happened somewhere else.
We design and make bespoke NFC housings, enclosures and inserts in our Leith workshop, in acrylic, timber, resin and 3D-printed polymer, and we read-test what we build before it ships.
What we make
- Product housings and enclosures with the tag designed in, not retrofitted
- Magnetic mounts, pucks and discs
- Point-of-sale and counter units
- Asset and equipment housings for industrial environments
- Prototype and short-run enclosures for products still in development
- Inserts and carriers to drop a tag into something you already make
Magnets, metal and read range
This is the part worth reading before you commit to a design.
NFC works by inductive coupling at 13.56 MHz. Put a neodymium magnet or a metal face inside the antenna's footprint and you detune the coil and dump energy into eddy currents — read range collapses, sometimes to nothing. It is the standard failure mode for magnet-plus-NFC products, and it is entirely avoidable at the design stage.
- On-metal (ferrite-backed) tags are the first fix, and they cost a few pence more rather than a few pounds
- Better still, keep the magnet outside the coil footprint — a ring magnet with the tag inside it beats a disc magnet dead centre every time
- A few millimetres of designed-in separation, with ferrite between magnet and tag, does more than any amount of adjustment afterwards
If you already have CAD, send it and we'll tell you honestly whether the tag will read before you spend anything.
Prototype to short run
- We review the design for read range and for assembly, and say what we would change.
- We build a first article, encode it and measure the read range on a phone.
- You approve it, then we produce the batch.
We work from one unit to a few hundred, with no tooling cost. Above roughly 500 units injection moulding usually becomes the cheaper answer — we will tell you when you have reached that point rather than quietly keep printing.
Related
See also acrylic NFC stands, NFC keyrings and tags, 3D printing and unusual and one-off projects.
Get a quote
Email enquiries@cobblestonecreative.co.uk with what the product is, what the tag has to do and roughly how many you need. CAD helps but a sketch and a description is enough to start.