Package Design - December 2013 - 17

recalls. "He comes back five minutes later with a
MyJones' soda that had been on his desk for 10 years."
Being a frontrunner on the trend has helped Jones
streamline the ordering process. "You upload your
photo into an online template, put in your own custom
text for the back label, and choose which flavor you
want and whether you want a six or 12 pack," Baumann says. Another factor: the website was already
configured to accept consumers' photos. "Anybody can
have their photos on a Jones' soda," Baumann explains.
"They can just go to our website and submit a photo.
We have a team that goes through and picks new photos for label consideration regularly. More than a million photos have been submitted for consideration for
the regular Jones' label.
"For custom, we always get a lot of wedding photos
as well as big corporate orders for Christmas parties,
employee incentives or just for businesses that want to
hand out customized soda in their lobbies," Baumann
says. "The craze last year around the holidays was
labels customized with ultrasound photos!"
Events also drive sales of personalized product for
Sprecher Brewery. At time of publication, the brewery
and soda maker was getting ready for their Christmas
events. "Typically, you'll get people who want personalized beer or soda for a birthday, anniversary or wed-

ding, and they are looking to buy one to 10 cases,"
Kecia Sprecher, packaging manager, remarks. (The
brewery categorizes sales from one to 24 cases as personalized, and 24-plus as private label.) Right now,
we're getting ready for our Photo with Santa tour.
"You get a tour of the brewery, to sample different

products, to pose with Santa and can purchase root
beer with your photo on it," she says. "There's only a
minimum purchase of 12 bottles of personalized root
beer for events versus the case required for regular
personalized product orders.
"It's a festive, fun and inexpensive thing to do,"
Sprecher says, "and you go home with these personalized root beers, which are cheaper than a Hallmark
greeting card to give away."
Because of the immediate turnaround needed for
these events, the brewery prints the labels in house.
But Sprecher prefers to use digital print service providers for typical personalized product labels. It drives
up the turnaround time, which currently is six weeks
for nonevent or nonrush orders. "But the digitally produced labels have such a high print quality and the
paper withstands moisture so well," she says.

Control, that's what we've got
Conversely, Lips Inc. has decided to bring all label
printing in house. "Not only do we do our own printing, but we print on unconverted material and we do
our own laminated and die cutting," Warren Levine,
president and co-owner of the custom lip balm maker,
explains. "Our packaging quality certainly rivals the
labels from machines that cost upwards to half-a-million dollars. But our printer's nowhere near that cost."
Lips is part of a growing trend, says Rich Egert
from OKI Data Americas, which sold the personal
care company its label printer. "We developed these
printers to give small print-for-pay shops the ability to
produce quality products at an affordable price point.
What's happening is the packaged goods companies
are starting to use the printers for producing labels in
house. Boutique and specialty food companies are
using these continuous label printers to make labels
for anything from wine labels to macaroni.
"The nice thing about our web press is there's no
ink so there's no mixing," Egert explains. "It's all
Pantone-calibrated, and it's a PDF-based workflow.
Our label management system takes care of the rest,
such as label imposition for different applicators."
This simplicity helped Lips create a business based
on flexibility in product (each flavor requires a different ingredient label) and packaging. "We started the
business seven years ago," Jodi Levine, founder and
co-owner, says. "Now, we have more than 35 flavors
and we even regularly introduce seasonal flavors!"
Whether it's for lip balm or beer, personalized
packaging can deliver big banding benefits. After all,
what company couldn't benefit from a personal, positive connection to their consumers? PD
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Package Design - December 2013

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