Developing an eye-catching craft beer label can be an arduous undertaking. Vessel Packaging wants to help craft breweries easily navigate the production process by becoming a one-stop shop for label production in Canada.
“While we do canning and labelling in-house, we source out the printing, having developed a strong working relationship with a number of print shops,” said Evan Singer, Vessel Packaging’s national sales manager. “So, instead of a customer dealing with the technical details of printing their label correctly, we take on that role.”
Jason Neve, a production designer with Vessel Packaging, says brewery employees often wear many hats and working with a print shop can turn into a time-consuming process for them. “It can be overwhelming because you’re leaving the world of making beer and hosting customers, and you’re entering the world of production design and talking about Pantone colours, white layers and matte varnishes.” Based in Vancouver, Matt Leslie, Mitch Evanecz and Kevin Pederson established Vessel Packaging in 2019 after merging two companies: West Coast Canning in Vancouver (est. 2014) and Sessions Craft Canning (est. 2014) in Toronto.
“They saw the craft beer boom in the United States and how that was impacting the market there from consuming beer in bottles to cans,” said Singer. “Even though the craft brew industry in B.C. adopted cans more slowly, that was still where most consumers trends were heading.” Singer says they wanted to help the province’s craft brewers use traditional routes of canning beer, as it can be “a highly technical process that requires a big investment in expertise, equipment and space.”
The original three founders drove to Colorado to pick up a mobile canning line, and went directly to Vancouver Island and their first brewery job. “After they went from brewery-to-brewery filling cans, they realized that the actual canning equipment was not the biggest barrier to entering the can market,” said Singer. “It’s the cans themselves because manufacturers operate at huge, huge scales.”
Singer says sometimes the minimum quantities for cans range from 150,000 to 200,000 at a time, which doesn’t allow breweries much flexibility. “That’s when they started making the supplying of cans a core offering of Vessel Packaging as well,” said Singer. Craft breweries can order as little as 1,200 cans for small batches of an experimental brew or increase their order to a few truckloads to ship a best-selling IPA across Canada. “Mobile canning is still a core service at Vessel Packing,” said Singer. “However, supplying different types of cans has become much larger.”
Moving onto the graphic design side of the business was another way to lend convenience to the craft brewing industry and Vessel Packaging’s customers. “The process of working with Vessel Packaging is straightforward,” said Neve. “The customer uploads their artwork into our system and then right away it kicks over to our production design team, and we put that order under process right away.”
Neve says a detailed administrator will take care of the specifics, such as the can and label size, quantity and label type. “We have a whole team that circulates around making sure everything lines up,” he said. “The graphics team and I, once we receive the artwork, will basically run it through a checklist to ensure it has everything that it needs.”
Neve says there’s also a lot of technical work to consider. “We need fonts, images and labels, we check that we have everything. If we don’t have it, we go out to the customer,” said Neve. Asking a lot of questions is critical and Neve says the team puts in a lot of work behind the scenes. “We want to set the label up for success,” he said. “We’re trained professionals with experience in pre-press and technical design. So, we know how to troubleshoot these things.”
The process of working with Vessel Packaging is straightforward. The customer uploads their artwork into our system and then right away it kicks over to our production design team, and we put that order under process right away.
Jason Neve, Vessel Packaging
“Collaboration with the client is an essential component of our process. From the customer’s perspective, they’re working with Vessel Packaging on all parts of it,” Singer said. “While we take on that sort of detail-oriented work, working with the printer, providing recommendations, at the same time, you can’t make decisions on [the client’s] behalf,” said Neve. “So, we carefully communicate that outward to the customer and we really do that in a client-facing way.”
Neve says they’re also careful to avoid using industry jargon. “We offer a path of least resistance, but still offer value,” he said. “So that’s another part of it. We’re not creative designers, but we can make recommendations that can positively impact the label’s creation.” Neve says they’re very fortunate for the print shops they partner with to produce the labels. “We work with one or two key printers in the industry, and the reason we do that is we know that all of the labels we get from those two printers are the best quality,” he said. “We get great pricing, but most importantly, we know those labels are super compatible with our machines that apply the labels.”
It also allows them to experiment with the design and production of the labels, offering better value in addition to different and more striking looks. “We partnered with a flexographic printer that is really open to pushing the limit on what we can do,” said Neve. In the printing world, digital printing can communicate graphics in finite detail, featuring crisp lines, subtle gradients and endless colours. “So that’s a world that’s traditionally maintained for digital print, but our flexographic printer does a fantastic job doing that as well,” Neve said. “We’re experimenting and we’ve provided some sleeves that are just top, top quality, and that most flexographic printers would turn away.”
However, the real caveat with flexographic printing is the price. “Flexographic sleeves cost way less compared to digital,” Neve said. “A lot of folks in the industry think they need to pay more for their labels to get these beautiful artworks when, in fact, working with a flexographic printer like ours, you can still create these beautiful sleeves at a much lower cost. Our customers want a really great sleeve, but more importantly, they want a very low cost.”
Village Brewery in Calgary, Alta., is one of those customers that has collaborated with Vessel Packaging to elevate the designs of their labels. “They use a whole rotation of labels that are consistent in look and feel, but also have their own identity,” said Neve. “They take these really interesting risks and they have some very creative artworks, but they always came in flat.”
Neve says that Vessel suggested allowing the metallics of the can to shine through, offering some texture and depth to the label. “They printed on a white piece of paper and wrapped it around the can,” he said. “But there’s so much more that can be done by manipulating the effects of the label and the can.” Other design interventions can elicit the same results. However, it’s “really just using a knockout on the white layer, which is a simple trick,” said Neve. “But at the same time, if you don’t have a pretty good level of experience with graphic design and graphic design tools, it’s not intuitive.”
From offering sharp colours to fluorescent inks, Neve says the Vessel Packaging team enjoys sharing their expertise with customers. “It makes such a huge difference because now they’re talking to somebody that understands what they need, and what their limitations and expectations are,” he said. “We aren’t overloading them with technical information and making it cumbersome.”
For Vessel Packaging, cultivating relationships with their clients is critical. They want to see the craft brewing industry continue to thrive. “We find that when customers come to Vessel Packaging and solicit our services, they tend to stay longer,” said Neve. “So, when that happens, we grow, and they will grow with us because we have that next level of product or service that they need.” Vessel is staying on the cutting edge of can decoration by exploring new technologies such as fully recyclable labels, digital direct to can printing and other services offered by printing partners.
“We’re constantly seeking feedback from our customers in terms of what they would like to see us offer and have the ability to put out in the market,” said Singer. “It’s becoming increasingly important for beverage producers to tell a story with their packaging, whether it’s through eye-catching graphics, sustainable options or innovative ways of getting their brand displayed on the shelf. At Vessel, we’ll continue innovating and bringing that ability to their fingertips.”
