Digital printing specialist Peacock Bros. has successfully worked with Little Bang Brewery to help expand the beer-maker’s sales volumes from 5,000 litres to 400,000 litres annually.
Little Bang Brewery said it has achieved such strong business growth though the quality of its product and the high-impact visuals of its cans which Peacock Bros. created.
Operating with a limited sales marketing budget in the early years as a business, Little Bang Brewery relied on bold, creative 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,” Little Bang Brewery co-founder Ryan Davidson said.
“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. On the competitive retail shelf, we need our beer cans to be reaching out to the buyers saying, ‘Pick me up.’ And we knew that if we could grab a drinker’s attention for even two seconds, we were halfway to making a sale.”
In the past, Little Bang Brewery would develop the labels through Photoshop, having a labeller print them before staff manually applied these by hand. This process was not scalable though as the business grew, requiring Little Bang Brewery to seek an advanced, automated printing solution to meet their needs.
To assist Little Bang Brewery in developing an efficient and flexible printing solution that could produce high impact visuals to showcase the brand’s personality and provide a point of difference, the company turned to Peacock Bros.
“Peacock Bros. is proud to act as the label producer and printing partner for Little Bang Brewery,” Peacock Bros. group managing director Ryan McGrath said.
“Our HP Indigo digital colour label presses allow us to utilise features such as HP’s Mosaic variable data software functionalities. 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.”
By working with Peacock Bros. and utilising the Mosaic printing functionality, Little Bang Brewery now has printing flexibility, meaning every label can be different, but within defined parameters.
The software can keep certain design elements as they are and allow others to be varied creating a dynamic set of labels in a single print run.
“The Mosaic software can keep certain graphic elements the same, while allowing others to be varied with infinite combinations. For Little Bang Brewery, this means that the company can develop a dynamic set of labels that can either vary wildly or look similar without actually being the same – attracting shopper interest,” McGrath said.
In an industry first, Little Bang Brewery also 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 which 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 added.
