How a Queensland Brewery Used Customised Stubby Holders to Boost Brand Recall by 40% — and What You Can Learn From It

The Scenario: A Regional Brewery With a Brand Awareness Problem

Sunstone Brewing Co. (a fictitious but entirely realistic business) had been operating out of Noosa for just under three years when their marketing manager, Claire, realised they had a problem. Their beer was genuinely excellent — awarded at two regional food and beverage competitions — but outside the Sunshine Coast, almost nobody had heard of them. Their taproom was busy on weekends, their online store ticked along, but interstate reach? Practically zero.

Claire’s budget for the year was tight. A billboard campaign was out. Paid social had delivered mediocre results the previous quarter. And a sponsored radio segment had generated exactly one phone enquiry. So when a local events company suggested they invest a significant chunk of their remaining marketing budget into customised stubby holders for three upcoming Queensland festivals, Claire was sceptical.

She agreed anyway. And the results changed how Sunstone thought about promotional merchandise entirely.

The Strategy: Choosing the Right Events and the Right Product

Rather than scattering a generic order across a dozen small activations, Claire and her team focused their energy on three events where their target demographic — outdoor-loving, beer-appreciating 25–45-year-olds — would actually show up:

The Noosa Food & Wine Festival (May)
Woodford Folk Festival (December–January)
Brisbane Craft Beer Week (June)

For each event, Sunstone ordered a dedicated run of customised stubby holders featuring event-specific artwork. Each design retained the core Sunstone logo and URL but incorporated colours and motifs that tied directly to the event theme. The Woodford run, for example, used earthy greens and bronzes with a folk art–inspired wave pattern. The Brisbane Craft Beer Week batch leaned into a bold typographic treatment in the brewery’s signature rust and cream palette.

The total order across all three events came to 2,400 units — 800 per event — at a blended cost of approximately $3.20 per unit, including full-colour printing. Total investment: $7,680.

The Numbers: What Actually Happened

Here’s where it gets interesting. Claire’s team tracked outcomes across four key metrics over the six months following the first event.

Website Traffic

In the four weeks after the Noosa Food & Wine Festival, direct traffic to the Sunstone website increased by 28% compared to the same period the previous year. Claire attributed this directly to the stubby holders — each one included the brewery’s URL in a prominent but design-friendly position. People at the festival had taken them home, used them at their next barbecue, and pulled out their phone.

Across the three events, Sunstone’s Instagram handle (printed on every holder alongside their URL) was tagged in posts 214 times by people who received the stubby holders. This was user-generated content the brewery hadn’t paid a cent to produce. One post from a camper at Woodford — showing five of the Sunstone stubby holders lined up on a makeshift camp table under fairy lights — attracted over 1,800 likes and reached an estimated audience of 12,000 accounts.

Brand Recall Survey

Three months after the final event (Brisbane Craft Beer Week), Claire commissioned a simple online survey through a panel provider targeting Queensland beer drinkers. Of the 340 respondents who reported attending at least one of the three events, 41% could correctly name Sunstone Brewing Co. unprompted when asked which craft beer brands they’d encountered at a Queensland event in the past six months. Among respondents who couldn’t name Sunstone unprompted, 67% recognised the brand name when shown it — and 38% of that group specifically mentioned “the stubby holders” when asked to explain their familiarity.

Revenue Impact

Online sales from Queensland postcodes increased by 22% in the six months following the campaign, compared to the prior six-month period. Claire was careful to note that stubby holders weren’t the only variable — Sunstone had also refreshed their website — but the correlation was strong enough to make promotional merchandise a permanent line item in the following year’s budget.

Why Customised Stubby Holders Work So Well in the Australian Context

Sunstone’s results weren’t a fluke. They reflect something fundamental about how Australians socialise and where promotional products fit into that culture.

The Product Goes Everywhere Australians Go

Australians spend an enormous amount of leisure time outdoors — at the beach, in the backyard, at the footy, camping, fishing, at markets and festivals. These are precisely the environments where a cold drink in an insulating sleeve makes perfect sense. Unlike a branded tote bag that sits in the car boot, or a pen that stays in a desk drawer, customised stubby holders follow people into their most social moments.

That means your logo goes with them. It sits on the esky lid. It gets picked up, set down, photographed, and passed around. Over the useful life of a quality stubby holder — often several years — the number of brand impressions it generates is genuinely remarkable relative to its cost.

The Print Area Rewards Good Design

One of the reasons some businesses get mediocre results from promotional merchandise is that they treat the design as an afterthought. Customised stubby holders offer a wrap-around print surface that, when used well, can communicate not just a logo but a mood, a story, and a brand personality. Sunstone’s decision to create event-specific artwork — rather than slapping a generic logo on a black neoprene sleeve — is a textbook example of respecting the medium.

Good design makes people want to keep the product. People keep products they find attractive. Products they keep generate ongoing brand impressions. The logic is simple but routinely ignored.

They’re Accessible at Multiple Price Points

Claire’s team paid around $3.20 per unit for a full-colour, event-ready run at a mid-volume quantity. Businesses ordering higher volumes can bring that figure down significantly — large corporate orders can reach well under $2 per unit at scale. For sporting clubs, schools, or charities working with tighter budgets, smaller runs are also available, typically from around 50–100 units.

This flexibility means customised stubby holders are viable for a one-person tradie wanting to leave something memorable with their best clients, all the way through to a national retailer outfitting 30 trade show booths simultaneously.

Practical Lessons From Sunstone’s Campaign

Whether you’re running a Brisbane construction company, a Sydney yoga studio, or a craft gin distillery in the Adelaide Hills, there are several things Claire’s team did right that are worth replicating.

Match the Design to the Occasion

Generic designs produce generic results. If you’re ordering customised stubby holders for a specific event, lean into that event’s energy. Use colours, textures, and visual references that make recipients feel the product was made for that moment — because it was. This isn’t expensive; it’s a design brief conversation with your supplier.

Include a Call to Action That Makes Sense

Every Sunstone stubby holder included their website URL. Not their phone number (nobody calls breweries), not their postal address, not a QR code that would be impossible to scan on a curved surface. A clean, memorable web address that people could type into a browser three weeks later when they were buying beers for a gathering. Think carefully about what action you actually want someone to take — and make it easy.

Order for Retention, Not Just Distribution

One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is ordering the cheapest possible material to maximise giveaway numbers. A flimsy, low-density foam stubby holder that loses its shape after three uses doesn’t generate ongoing impressions — it ends up in the bin. Sunstone ordered high-quality neoprene construction throughout, prioritising product longevity over per-unit savings. Recipients kept them. That’s the entire point.

Think Beyond the Event

The 214 social media tags Sunstone received weren’t generated at the festivals themselves — they came after, as people used the stubby holders in their everyday lives. Plan for the afterlife of your product. This might mean including a hashtag, keeping the design interesting enough to spark conversation, or simply ensuring the construction quality means the product survives beyond a single outing.

Who Should Be Ordering Customised Stubby Holders Right Now?

Sunstone’s experience is instructive, but it’s worth mapping the product across the Australian business landscape more broadly.

Hospitality and beverage businesses are the obvious fit — breweries, distilleries, wineries from the Barossa to the Yarra Valley, bottle shops, and bars have been using branded stubby holders to reinforce their identity for decades. But the category extends far beyond drinks.

Sporting clubs across codes — from suburban AFL clubs in Melbourne’s outer east to junior cricket associations in Townsville — use customised stubby holders for fundraising merchandise, end-of-season presentations, and club membership drives. They’re practical, affordable, and genuinely appreciated by members.

Corporate event teams running conferences, off-site strategy days, product launches, or end-of-financial-year functions in cities like Perth, Sydney, and Melbourne regularly include stubby holders in their event merchandise mix. They pair naturally with other branded items and land well with attendees who’d rather receive something useful than another branded USB drive.

Fundraising committees — school P&Cs, community groups, charitable organisations — find customised stubby holders one of the most profitable fundraising merchandise items available. The combination of low unit cost, high perceived value, and broad appeal across demographics makes them consistently strong performers at community events.

Tradies and service businesses are a growing segment. A plumber in Canberra who leaves a branded stubby holder after completing a job has left something that will sit in that household for years — ready to prompt a referral or a repeat booking every time someone reaches into the fridge.

Getting Your Order Right: A Quick Checklist

Before you place your order for customised stubby holders, work through these considerations:

Quantity: Are you ordering for a specific event (fixed number) or as an ongoing giveaway item (order buffer stock)?
Material: Neoprene offers superior insulation and durability; foam is budget-friendly for high-volume short-term use. Know which suits your purpose.
Print method: Full-colour digital printing handles complex artwork and photography beautifully; screen printing suits bold, simple designs at high volumes.
Design brief: Have your logo files in high resolution (vector preferred), and decide whether you need event-specific artwork or a standard brand treatment.
Lead time: Quality custom runs typically require 10–15 business days; factor this into your event planning well in advance, particularly around busy periods like Christmas and the AFL finals.
Call to action: Decide what you want recipients to do — visit your website, follow your social media, call your team — and ensure that information is clearly incorporated into the design.

The Lasting Value of a Simple Product

Claire’s initial scepticism about customised stubby holders was understandable. In a marketing landscape saturated with digital channels, influencer activations, and algorithmic campaigns, a small insulated sleeve for a cold drink can seem almost quaint.

But Sunstone’s campaign delivered a 41% unaided brand recall rate among event attendees, a 22% lift in regional online sales, and over 200 pieces of organic user-generated content — all from a $7,680 investment in a product that Australians genuinely want to own and use. No algorithm required.

The stubby holder works because it meets Australians where they actually live — outdoors, together, with a cold drink in hand. For any business trying to build genuine, lasting brand recognition in this country, that’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.