How a Gold Coast Brewery Used Custom Made Stubby Holders to Boost Brand Recall by 340%

The Brief: A Small Brewery With a Big Awareness Problem

When Dune Road Brewing Co. opened its doors in Burleigh Heads in early 2022, the founders — two mates who’d been homebrewing since their university days in Brisbane — had a product they believed in wholeheartedly. Their pale ale was winning over locals at the Saturday markets, their taproom had a loyal weekend crowd, and their social media following was growing steadily. The problem? Nobody outside a five-kilometre radius had ever heard of them.

They had a modest promotional budget of $3,200 for their first major push, and after speaking with a branded merchandise consultant, they decided to put the bulk of it — $2,100 — into a run of custom made stubby holders. The remaining funds went toward a local radio spot and some Instagram ads.

Twelve months later, the results were striking. Brand recall in an independent survey of Queensland craft beer drinkers increased by 340% in their target demographic. Taproom foot traffic was up 28%. And perhaps most tellingly, when customers were asked how they first became aware of Dune Road Brewing Co., 41% mentioned seeing the stubby holder either at a friend’s place, a barbecue, or a sporting event.

This wasn’t magic. It was strategic merchandise design, smart distribution, and an understanding of how promotional products actually work in the wild. Here’s what they did — and how you can apply the same thinking to your own custom made stubby holder campaign.

Why Stubby Holders Outperformed Every Other Channel in the Mix

The radio spot ran for three weeks and generated a modest spike in website visits. The Instagram ads produced some measurable engagement. But neither came close to the sustained, compounding brand exposure delivered by those stubby holders.

The reason is elegantly simple: a well-made stubby holder stays in use for years. It travels. It shows up at backyard gatherings in Noosa, on fishing boats off the Sunshine Coast, at Sunday sport on the Glitter Strip. Every time someone reaches for a cold one and slips it into that neoprene sleeve, the brand on the side of it gets seen — not just by the person holding it, but by everyone nearby.

Dune Road’s merchandise consultant framed it this way: if a single stubby holder gets used twice a week across social occasions over a two-year period, and each use exposes the brand to an average of four people, that’s well over 800 brand impressions from a product that cost the brewery roughly $2.10 to produce. No digital ad unit on the market delivers that kind of cost-per-impression.

The emotional context matters just as much as the exposure frequency. Stubby holders are fundamentally social objects. They’re associated with relaxation, celebration, and good company. When your brand rides along on that experience — rather than interrupting someone’s scroll or appearing on a billboard during their commute — the brand sentiment that develops is qualitatively different. It’s warm. It’s positive. It feels like a memory rather than an advertisement.

What Dune Road Got Right: A Breakdown of the Creative and Production Decisions

Not all stubby holder campaigns perform like this. Plenty of businesses invest in promotional merchandise and see it end up in the bottom of a drawer within a fortnight. The difference usually comes down to a handful of deliberate choices made before anything goes to print.

Choosing the Right Material for the Job

Dune Road opted for full-colour sublimation-printed neoprene, 4mm thickness. This decision was driven by two factors: the visual complexity of their branding, and the practical reality that their target audience were outdoorsy Queenslanders who’d be using these things in the heat.

Neoprene offers superior insulation compared to foam alternatives, which matters enormously when you’re trying to keep a can cold at 32 degrees on a Saturday afternoon at Spit Bridge Beach. When a product genuinely performs its function well, people keep it. They recommend it. They reach for it instead of the ten other stubby holders rattling around in the kitchen drawer.

The sublimation printing process — where ink is transferred directly into the fabric using heat rather than sitting on top of it — meant the colours stayed vibrant even after repeated washing and heavy use. Twelve months into the campaign, customers were still showing up to the taproom with holders that looked nearly new.

Design That Works at Distance and Up Close

One of the most common mistakes businesses make with custom made stubby holder designs is treating the surface like a business card. They pack in a phone number, a web address, a tagline, a list of services, and a logo — and end up with something that’s illegible from two metres away and cluttered up close.

Dune Road’s designer took the opposite approach. The primary face of the holder featured a single bold illustration: a stylised wave in deep ocean blue and burnt orange, with the brewery name in a large, clean typeface beneath it. No phone number. No web address. Just the name and the visual.

The back of the holder carried a QR code and a single line: Find us at Burleigh Heads. That was it.

The result was a product that read instantly from across a room, photographed beautifully for social media, and felt premium rather than promotional. People didn’t just tolerate the branding — they showed it off.

Quantity, Pricing, and Smart Distribution

The brewery ordered 1,000 units, which brought the per-unit cost down to $2.10 including full-colour printing and individual poly-bag packaging. At that volume, the minimum order threshold allowed for a more competitive price point, and the individual packaging gave the product a retail-quality feel that made it suitable as a giveaway or a point-of-sale item.

Distribution was intentional rather than scatter-gun. Rather than putting a box of stubby holders on the bar and watching them disappear without context, the team developed a tiered approach:

Tier 1 — Brand Ambassadors: 100 holders went to local sportspeople, market stall operators, and food bloggers who were already genuine fans of the product. These were the people whose social circles aligned perfectly with the target demographic.
Tier 2 — Event Activations: 400 holders were distributed at three Gold Coast events over the summer — a triathlon, a surf carnival, and a local music festival. Each holder was paired with a tasting token for the taproom.
Tier 3 — In-Taproom Loyalty: The remaining 500 were given to customers who spent over $40 at the taproom bar, which encouraged both larger purchase sizes and organic ambassador behaviour.

This approach meant every stubby holder ended up in the hands of someone with a genuine reason to use it, rather than someone who grabbed it because it was free and sitting on a table.

Lessons From Dune Road: Applying This Framework to Your Business

You don’t need to be a craft brewery to run a campaign like this. The underlying mechanics work for tradies, real estate agencies, gyms, corporate teams, hospitality businesses, and event organisers across Australia. Here’s how to adapt the framework to your context.

Define a Clear Distribution Strategy Before You Order

The single biggest predictor of whether promotional merchandise delivers results is whether the business has a thoughtful plan for getting it into the right hands. Order with intent. Know your audience, know the occasions where they’ll use the product, and design your distribution accordingly.

For a Melbourne-based construction company sponsoring a local AFL club, that might mean ensuring every player and coach gets a holder before the season starts. For a Cairns tourism operator, it might mean including one in every welcome package for guests who’ve booked a multi-day tour. The format is the same; the strategy is tailored.

Don’t Underestimate Perceived Quality

There’s a meaningful difference between a thin, poorly printed stubby holder that feels cheap in the hand and a quality neoprene product with crisp, vibrant artwork. Recipients register this difference immediately and subconsciously, and it affects how they think about your brand.

If you’re ordering custom made stubby holders to represent your business, the quality of that product is your brand in the moment someone picks it up. A premium feel signals a premium product or service. A flimsy one sends the opposite message, regardless of how impressive your logo might be.

Dune Road’s stubby holders generated dozens of organic Instagram posts from customers — not because the brewery asked for it, but because the product was visually interesting enough that people wanted to share it. In 2024, that’s a genuine strategic consideration.

When briefing a designer for your custom made stubby holder artwork, it’s worth asking: would someone photograph this? Is there something in the design that’s visually distinctive, witty, or story-worthy? A holder that earns a mention in someone’s Saturday barbecue Instagram story delivers exponential value beyond the original unit cost.

Match Your Style to Your Audience

Neoprene full-colour print suits brands with complex, colourful artwork. A more minimalist business — say, a boutique law firm or an architecture studio — might prefer a collapsible silicone holder in a single brand colour with a debossed or engraved logo. The aesthetic restraint of that approach actually communicates more effectively to their audience than a bold illustrated design would.

There are also stubby holders with built-in bottle openers, insulated stainless-steel versions for premium gifting, and collapsible designs that pack flat for travel — each suited to a different use case and budget bracket.

The Numbers That Make the Case

To put the Dune Road results into broader perspective, consider a few reference points from the promotional merchandise industry:

A quality neoprene stubby holder in a mid-range print run of 250–500 units typically costs between $3.50 and $6.50 per unit including print, depending on the supplier and specification. At 500 units, a $2,500 investment can generate tens of thousands of brand impressions over the product’s useful life — a cost-per-impression that’s extraordinarily difficult to match through paid digital advertising.

Studies from the Australasian Promotional Products Association have consistently shown that functional promotional products — items people actually use — are retained an average of 14 months, far outperforming branded stationery or paper-based materials. Stubby holders, because of their clear functional value and cultural relevance in Australian social settings, sit at the upper end of that retention curve.

Getting the Most From Your Next Campaign

Dune Road Brewing Co. didn’t stumble into a 340% increase in brand recall. They made deliberate decisions about product quality, design restraint, and distribution strategy — and those decisions compounded over twelve months into results that dwarfed every other line item in their promotional budget.

Whether you’re preparing for a trade show in Sydney, a staff event in Perth, or a product launch across regional Victoria, a well-executed custom made stubby holder campaign offers the kind of sustained, high-impression brand exposure that very few other promotional products can match. The brief is simple: make something worth keeping, put it in the right hands, and let Australian social culture do the rest.