Mechanical engineer needed to construct a label applicator

Hi there! We're a children's clothing company that is looking for someone to design and build a contraption that can take a roll of barcode stickers and automatically attach each sticker to a paper tag. These tags and labels are for individual items of clothing that are stored in a warehouse.

At the moment, we complete this repetitive action by hand one-by-one for thousands of labels, and we are looking for a way to automate and speed this up. This contraption should not require expensive or bulky machinery, as the stickers and labels are small.

Requirements:
- The stickers must to be affixed to the paper tags in the same order as they’re printed, as they correspond to specific clothing items - so cannot be processed out of order.
- Presently, this is a highly manual and labor-intensive (aka $$$) activity - so we don't want a solution which requires a person standing by the machine and affixing the stickers by hand. The less time a human has to spend on this, the better!


Specifications:
Sticker size is 1¼” x 2¼”
Tag size is 1½” x 3½”
The spool of tags can range from 2” to 4” diameter.


A stack of 30 tags is about ½”