Designing a unique can of beer

Digital printing specialist Peacock Bros. has worked with Little Bang Brewery to help expand the beermaker’s sales volumes from 5000 to 400,000 L annually. This achievement was helped by the use of bold artwork on the range of cans produced by the beermaker, including one that features unique designs for each can.

In its early day, the brewery operated on a limited marketing budget so relied on the eye-catching visuals on its cans to draw shopper interest online and instore.

“I wanted to turn every beer can into a little sales representative on the shelf,” said Ryan Davidson, Co-founder of Little Bang Brewery. “We knew that our business couldn’t afford a sales team all over the country pushing our product so that meant the product itself had to be out there doing the selling for us.”

The company would design its own labels, which were then printed and applied to the beer cans manually by staff members. This was a labour-intensive process that proved impossible to scale as the business grew so it turned to Peacock Bros. for help.

In addition to being able to produce labels with less manual work than previously, Peacock Bros. used features on its HP Indigo digital colour label presses, such as the Mosaic variable data software functionalities, that allowed the brewery to sustain creativity while increasing productivity. This resulted in labels that were not just graphically interesting but also unique.

“Peacock Bros. is proud to act as the label producer and printing partner for Little Bang Brewery,” said Ryan McGrath, Group Managing Director at Peacock Bros. “The digitally printed labels we produced deliver Little Bang Brewery high levels of creativity and colour variation in the artwork, with the flexibility to print different labels for every SKU.”

Little Bang Brewery worked with Peacock Bros. to develop an algorithm that gave every single beer can a different name and printed these uniquely. The initiative was developed for the Little Bang Hazy IPA beer can and has produced over 75,000 different names to date, meaning 75,000 different labels printed in runs of one.

“Peacock Bros. have been a true partner for Little Bang Brewery. They helped us develop a flexible digital printing solution that accelerated our creativity and amplified our brand personality that was scalable as our business grew. Standing out on a crowded retail shelf is difficult as a challenger brand and the Peacock Bros. solution helped us to do just that,” Davidson said.