It’s back to square one for Avery Dennison Corp. after last week’s collapse of the deal to sell its consumer products business to 3M Co.

Facing intensifying competition to get its office products on shelves at a dwindling number of office stores, the giant Pasadena label maker wants to exit the consumer products business to focus on its core labeling and packaging operations.

The deal announced last January to sell the business for $550 million to 3M, the Minneapolis-based manufacturing conglomerate, seemed to fit the bill. Antitrust concerns from the Department of Justice scuttled that plan. But a sale to another company is already a possibility.

“We have been contacted by other interested parties,” Avery spokesman David Frail told the Business Journal.

Avery Dennison is likely to get interest from both strategic buyers in the office products industry and from private-equity investors actively scouring the consumer and packaging sectors for deals, according to Ghansham Panjabi, analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. in New York.

But, Panjabi said, Avery Dennison might have to settle for a lower price than 3M’s offer.

“Since there is one less strategic buyer, that could put some downwards pressure on the transaction price,” he said. “However, we doubt that Avery would sell the unit for a materially lower price.”

That prospect might have been enough to send Avery Dennison shares dropping Oct. 4, the day after the deal fell apart. The share price fell $1.38 to $30.07, a 4.4 percent drop.

In late August, the Department of Justice informed both Avery Dennison and 3M that it would reject the deal on antitrust grounds. The deal would have given 3M an estimated 80 percent share of the labels and sticky notes market.

The two companies later issued a joint statement Sept. 4 saying they would restructure the deal to address the government’s concerns.

That proved unworkable, Panjabi said, because it would have required Avery Dennison selling off so many business segments and product lines to the point where the purchase no longer made sense to 3M. Plus, he added, the prospect of Avery Dennison having to sell to multiple parties could have proved too daunting.