At Rocket Badge, we’ve worked with many great breweries to create customised merchandise, like beer badges. Bespoke beer merchandise is an effective way to raise the visibility of your brewery and your products, and now is the time to do so. The number of breweries in the UK tipped above 2,000 last year, a 64 percent increase over the past five years! But how you display your brewery merchandise can be just as important as the design of the merchandise itself. Here, we share some creative ideas for showcasing your merch to help keep your beer top of mind – and top of taste – among your customers. Cheers!
4 Creative Ways to Display Beer Badges
A Big Bowl o’Beer Badges
Here’s a fun, engaging, yet no-frills way to display your beer badges: Put them in a big bowl! It sounds basic, but a bowl full of brightly coloured beer badges not only looks great, but it provides your customers with a tactile experience of selecting their favourite badge. These small, but enjoyable interactions may help your customers form a memorable and positive association with your brewery. We think they’ll enjoy digging through the treasure to find that perfect, special button!
On top of the engagement benefit, a big bowl o’ beer buttons just looks really great sitting atop a merchandise table, your bar or at a booth at a beer event. There’s ample opportunities to incorporate a bowl into fun brewery or event contents, like a trivia night, spinning wheel or customer of the day drawing. If your brewery happens to have large beer steins, you could also fill those with beer buttons for a thematic touch.
Stick a Pin in It
Another idea is to get creative with materials that you can find in any arts and crafts or home improvement store. Cork boards, canvas fabric and small boxes are readily available, low-cost and make great backdrops for your beer badges. Try pinning a selection of your badges to the cork board or apply them to the canvas as a wall hanging. This approach is a great solution to create more space on a table at a busy beer festival.
Another idea is to find small boxes and place your badges in an easy-to-transport display that can be picked up and admired by your brewery fans. If you have enough variety in your beer badges, you could even sell complete sets of all of your beer badges in a special boxed package.
BrewDog
Rock It, Wear It
Badges are a perfect promotional item because they get noticed! People love to rock special custom badges on their hats, bags and clothing. An Insider article presents some creative ideas for how people wear badges today, including on lapels, collars, in surprising and subtle places like extra belt loops or to spruce up vintage leather and jean jackets. Consider tapping into this trend with a special line of vibrant beer badges that people can wear; every person that does becomes a walking, talking ambassador of your beer!
While you’re at it, don’t forget about your most important beer ambassadors – your dedicated staff! Let your team set a fashion example and provide them with their own beer badges that they can wear on lapels or hats when working at the brewery or while staffing a festival. Badges make great conversation starters, too. Encourage your team to talk about the badges and the significance of their design. For example, maybe each badge represents a different style of beer. Humor works, too! We love these badges from the Half Acre Beer Co. Wouldn’t you be intrigued to ask a brewery team member what they mean by Beer Hates Astronauts?!
Half Acre Brewing
A Nod to Nostalgia: Beer Badge Vending Machines
Our final idea is to get nostalgic! Remember those toy vending machines from when you were a kid? Why not add an adult version to your brewery or booth with a beer badge vending machine? It will add a fun, vintage touch and could even bring in a bit of revenue – many vending products allow you to set the price and the quantity dispersed. Another idea is to gift tokens to customers that can be redeemed for use in the beer badge vending machine. Here’s an example to get those creative brewery juices flowing!
We hope this post gives you some ideas for clever ways to display your killer beer badges. Remember, the right merchandise can help your brewery stand apart from the other more than 2,000 breweries, but don’t forget about how you showcase your merchandise to your fans. There are countless opportunities for fun and engaging campaigns and the right approach can add whimsy and visibility to your merchandise and your products.
What other ideas do you have for your merchandise and how to display it? We’d love to hear them!
