The First Black Hops Tap Blackout

The report shows that only 9% of consumers spend more blackout than $100 a week on craft beer, so only a few will spend $100 on a box. With an average weekly spend of $56, that’s a new RRP for our 16-pack of pale ales.

So far, the vast majority of customers blackout are buying 4 packs of dark hops. We wanted a format that would allow them to buy more than 4 units, but not stretch the budget too far. From a price perspective, the 16 packs match perfectly.

Litho vs blackout Printed Boxes

Our initial 12-pack was litho designed (nice, shiny, glossy) and we used a plain box with a label for each beer. The boxes looked great, but the process of packaging the beer was very manual and the litho boxes were expensive.

We got them from a local supplier via China, and had to order thousands at a time in order to get the price down to a reasonable level (under $2 per box). Going through China also meant waiting months to get the boxes.

We have now started using Carole Park Corrugated Products (a Visy company), which manufactures corrugated products locally and uses stamping technology to make the boxes. This makes the boxes much cheaper (about 50 cents per box, even for small orders) and the turnaround time for the boxes is much faster.

These boxes are obviously cheaper, but there are some trade-offs.
If you want to print all the way to the edge, you’ll need a custom stereo setup, which is not a cheap exercise. Because our branding is black rather than white (the base color of the box), we felt it was critical to maintain a consistent look for the Core Series boxes.

 Therefore, for our Core Series, we customize each box with a stereo. For the limited versions, we don’t print all the way to the edge, which means these boxes look different and are a little cheaper.

They’re not the pretty shiny type, so the boxes don’t look too good. However, we feel the printing goes all the way to the edge and the boxes look very nice and the matte look suits our brand.

These boxes are only one A4 sheet with the available colors on it, and if you use more than a few colors, the box can get messy. Therefore, we had to choose the colors very carefully and design a box with only two colors. The box itself is white, so our design only includes black hops, blue-black and other colors (see below).