Sterkstokers, a distillery based in Brecht, Belgium, offers customers a personalised and bespoke spirit distilling experience where individuals and brands can create their own alcohol flavour blends and design their own unique personalised bottle designs.
Thomas Cuyvers, Sterkstokers Master Distiller and Managing Director, launched the first iteration of the company in his garage in 2011. With a background as a yeast specialist for bakers, when Thomas started experimenting with yeast to create spirits, little did he know that distilling ran in the family. His great-grandfather Driek “Den Driek” Cuyvers, illegally distilled jenever, a juniper flavoured traditional Belgian liquor, during the German occupation of Belgium, and his grandfather Antoon was also fined by the occupying forces for the illegal possession and use of a still just before the liberation. Thomas was quite unaware of this piece of family history until he later took up the craft, giving Sterkstokers a story just as unique as each blend it crafts for customers.
It was while experimenting with different flavours that Thomas had the idea for the business model that works so well today. “I had a little bit of success because I produced small batches,” says Thomas. “The first customer came to me and asked for the same recipe with another colour. Then after a short time, another person came to me and asked me to make a gin with pumpkin for a local pumpkin festival. I noticed that it was really easy to create this recipe, so I started developing a whole library for my customers.”
The Sterkstokers experience
Nestled next to the beautiful canal in Sint-Lenaarts, Sterkstokers’ modern and light industrial building embodies factory-chic, emanating the company’s brand of bespoke and high quality products. Doubling as a working distillery and a venue to host groups for workshops and team building days, the Sterkstokers experience can be felt from the moment customers set foot in the door, from the tastefully branded wooden barrels filled with distilling spirits to the floor-to-ceiling shelves of glass apothecary jars of botanicals and flavourings, with a vibrant space displaying hundreds of creative bottle designs to explore just next door.
Thomas continues: “We have a model where we invite our customers to choose their ingredients from our aromatic library and we help them with the blending during a hands-on workshop. After a few weeks we can produce this recipe and our customers can have 60 bottles of their own blend, bottled with their own bottle designs to take away. This is a unique position in the market.”
Sterkstokers’ main customer groups include restaurants and individuals who create their own branded gins and companies either seeking a unique business gift for customers or team building days.
Direct-to-object printing lends itself perfectly to this bespoke and personalised business model, and since investing in an Inkcups Helix ONE® UV direct-to-object cylindrical printer in May 2024, Sterkstokers is now able to offer bespoke designs more suited to smaller print runs and print runs of one, alongside its personalised spirit blends. Adding high-quality DTO-printed bottle designs to its offering has enabled Sterkstokers to elevate its model significantly.
Bespoke direct-to-object printing
Prior to investing in Inkcups DTO technology, Sterkstokers was decorating its bottles with traditional adhesive labels, which worked fine for large volumes. However, the personalised experience that Sterkstokers offers its customers isn’t well-suited to this approach. Recognising this, Thomas began experimenting with DTO printing options, catching the attention of his customers whilst doing so. Thomas explains that it was Inkcups’ European service and support, the high quality of the machine, and the ease of operating the machine that made the Helix ONE® stand out from any alternatives he had explored. “With the new Inkcups machine we don’t have any problems anymore,” says Thomas. “The main benefit is the quality of the printing. It’s really, really nice.”
A huge benefit, Thomas explains, is the level of support Inkcups offers. Being a distillery and not a printing company, this has been crucial in Sterkstokers’ success with the Helix ONE®. “After the installation they helped us with the technical advice and after a few months they got back in contact to evaluate how it was working and besides the small questions, we had no problems,” he says.
Wim Janssens, Distiller at Sterkstokers, is responsible for print production at the company and echoes Thomas’ thoughts. He explains how Inkcups’ intensive training really helped the team to get up and running on the new machine quickly. “I really like using it, it’s really easy to use. We had a DTO printer before but the safety features weren’t so good and we didn’t have training for it, so we damaged quite a lot [of printheads]. With the Helix ONE®, it’s a very safe machine with lots of sensors so that if something goes wrong it just shuts down.”
Since investing in the Helix ONE®, around 70% of customers choose DTO-printed labels due to the quality and special effects possible. Thomas says: “For me, the recipe, the flavours, everything combined together is important, but at the end the design and the experience is the most important. It’s the first thing they see. After that, if it’s good they will repeat buy. But the first thing is the bottle.”
“The first thing is the bottle”
“Our most inventive print is a kind of cracked design with only varnish on the bottle on transparent glass, creating the effect of old glass and then on top we print with colours the design and the text,” says Thomas. “The result is that everybody wants to touch the bottle like, ‘wow what’s that?’.”
Reflecting on some of his favourite effects possible with the Helix ONE®, Wim adds: “You can do a lot of things with the printer, you are only limited by your imagination. You can print with varnish or without varnish. We have special bottles that are coated, but when you print varnish on it you can see through it, so you can do a lot of crazy designs with it. We designed a whisky bottle that I really like that has a sort of snakeskin design on it using the varnish.”
