Long live front and back labels
We had to make a painful decision earlier this month. When we started 8 years ago there were a lot of things we had our hearts set on that weren’t normally done in the beverage industry – in fact, our glass supplier (we still work with the same salesman after all these years) and I still laugh about it.
We wanted to start with rectangular bottles (still hasn’t happened)
We wanted messages under the caps (happened 2 years into the business)
We wanted to brew our tea with real tea leaves and spring water instead of concentrate or powder
We wanted to use organic honey or sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup
I remember in one meeting the manager of a bottling plant asked me whether we wanted to pack our tea 25 bottles to the case instead of the customary 24. I asked him, “Why would we want to do that?” and he replied, “Because we don’t do that either!”
One other thing we insisted on was putting on a front and back label on the bottles. We believed that this kind of label treatment accomplished several important things:
It let the customer see that we weren’t trying to hide anything – the right message for an “Honest” product
It helped convey the “wine-like” gourmet quality of the product we were making, especially important since our tea is packed in a standard juice bottle
It created a distinctive presence on the shelf
But of course we couldn’t find a bottling plant that was capable of putting on the front and back label. Rather than give in to convention and use a wraparound label like everyone else, we decided to pack our bottles in Buffalo with no labels on them. Then we loaded the unlabeled bottles onto a truck, shipped them to a warehouse outside of Philadelphia where the bottles were run through a shampoo bottle labeling line, then repacked into cases (using a hair dryer to seal the shrink wrap), and shipped out from there. It was pretty much a disaster – ridiculously expensive, and that’s not even including the time the labeling folks put Assam back labels on Moroccan Mint bottles!! But as foolish as this strategy was, it enabled us to launch Honest Tea the way we wanted to, and after all, as a cash-starved start-up, the bottles were the only way to communicate what we were about.
About a year after we launched, we found a way to apply the labels to the bottles on the bottling line and ever since then we’ve continued with the front and back labels for our glass line. That is until now. Last month our front and back labeler died – and yet as many of our customers know, that labeler was limping along for quite a few years – our labels were often wrinkly, crooked or bubbly – not worthy of the high-quality product inside. So when our labeler crashed and we considered the $250,000 cost for a new labeler, we instead decided to look at other options. After a great deal of redesign work and even more personal angst, we finally came up with a look for a wraparound label that we think is consistent with our brand’s look. Because this is such a busy time of year, the new labels will start appearing on shelves on the East Coast later this month. The West Coast labeler is still hanging in there so it may be some time before wraparound labels start appearing out there.
We still have rolls of our original labels from the shampoo bottle in our office – we keep them right by the door – partially to remind everyone of our humble-and-not-always-rational beginnings, but also because they’re fun to stick on people who walk in.
Keep your eyes out for the new labels, and you may want to save the front and back ones – they’ll soon become collectors’ items. Honestly yours, Seth