New labels to withstand the elements for New Limburg
New Limburg Brewing Co. is a family company making Belgian style ales. Based out of Norfolk County, Ont., father and son – Jo and Mischa Geven – started brewing as a hobby. The beer was a hit with friends and family. Having moved from Limburg in the Netherlands to Limburg in Belgium, they had come to appreciate the Belgian style beer. Inspired, they decided to try and recreate that beer culture in their business. New Limburg was born.
Challenge
Being a smaller brewing company, New Limburg experimented with bottling labels on their own to start. According to Yvonne Moonen, NewLimburg’s Artist & Administration, she’d never worked with a labelling company before. Responsible for the label’s artwork, she purchased a desktop label printer to print the labels in-house. Moonen thought this would give her the flexibility to print smaller runs and make changes as she went along.
“I wanted to be sure that if we had to change something, we didn’t have 10,000 labels lying around,” she said. “We were small and didn’t know how it would pan out in the end.”
What resulted was a desktop label printing system that had stock limitations and quality issues, particularly with the colour. While they sometimes experienced other issues with moisture on the bottle and peeling labels, colour remained the top issue.
“They couldn’t withstand light,” Moonen said. “The colour was bleached with lines on it sometimes that we didn’t want. [Our desktop printer] was a nice machine but not really for our purpose.”
Solution
New Limburg reached out to the team at Lorpon Labels in fall 2016. On their original call, they expressed wanting to use a paper label, and Lorpon agreed by suggesting a paper label with a water-resistant feature.
In addition to brilliant colour,
Lorpon’s digital printing transformed the client’s artwork into a living entity, allowing for both real-time proofing and editing. This meant the client would no longer have to worry about making changes to the labels after a large print run. With Lorpon, information could be easily added, edited or removed, and colours quickly corrected.
The cost per label to print digital was compatible with the desktop because of stock, toners, etc. As the relationship matured over the last year, Lorpon has been able to recommend new embellishments to the labels, such as using foil which has really increased the labels’ shelf appeal.
“We found Lorpon; their services were more cost effective and the quality was – of course – way better. And we had a choice of a lot of different kinds of labels,” Moonen said. “For us, it was a way better quality than the printer we had ourselves.”
While some end users purchase their own label printer and some of these printers are considered digital, they lack high resolution, and have almost no ability for colour correction or control.
Lorpon’s digital presses produce colour that edges out traditional offset quality, and further gives your company’s product a competitive advantage.
According to Paul Barker a Sales Consultant with Lorpon Labels, “There were certain suggestions that we made to make New Limburg’s labels press-friendly and more viable if we were going to make changes. We made sure it wasn’t too costly, or changed over the entire look.”
In terms of their experience with Lorpon, the team at New Limburg has nothing but praise to share.
“We’ve been very happy so far. We’ve got all the labels the way we want them now, or at least we’re moving in that direction,” said Mischa Geven, Co-Founder & Brewer. “The Lorpon team been very helpful in selecting all the materials and bringing samples. At first, one of the issues was the wrinkling of the labels especially when they got wet, and that seems to be worked out now.”
Mischa attributed some of their success factors of their working relationship with Lorpon to their ongoing communication and conversation, as well as Lorpon’s ability to have sit-down meetings to review paper stock and other embellishments.
Mischa noted the new embellished labels are a visual improvement and he is excited to see them
#OwnTheShelf, as well as the impact in sales when they hit the LCBO in December.
“It’s hard to say right now how much of a difference the new labels are making because we’ve only been selling through our own,” he said. “When we go into the LCBO in December, we’ll be able to more easily compare the sales.”
But, according to Moonen, the labels are about more than just sales.
“Sometimes, people buy a bottle just to collect it and our original labels couldn’t even be put in light, but now we are confident that the colour will hold. This is thanks to Lorpon.”
