Stubby Holders - An Australian Icon

In Australia, we love our beer. Your typical Aussie weekend involves your average Aussie bloke standing around his "barbie", with his "mates" drinking a "coldie" or two. If you haven't heard any of these terms, you haven't been to Australia, met an Australian, or live in the North Pole!

The term "coldie" refers to a nice, cold beer (you of course are only human if are starting to drool!), but the question always remains, how to keep it cold. After years of carting around "eskies" full of ice, some genius invented the stubby holder. The simple act of wrapping a piece of rubber around a can or bottle, stitching up the side and keeping your beer cold has become an Australian icon, the stubby holder.

They started off simple, with just one or two colours of screen printing "Wazza's 21st Birthday" perhaps emblazoned across the side, or " I went to the big lobster" proudly standing next to of a sketch of some weird looking bug thing that was supposed to be a crayfish. People still collected them, stole them and sometimes even payed for them, all over Australia.

Wetsuit Coolers, in Adelaide South Australia, have been making stubby holders for over 20 years. They have sent stubby holders all over the world (even to the North Pole to keep you hand from sticking to your beer!). Over the past 5 years, a dramatic change has occurred, with the introduction of sublimation ink printing.

You can now not only tell everyone you went to Wazza's 21st, but you can proudly display a picture of Wazza holding up a big fish and a big grin, perhaps maybe a ghastly picture of Wazza throwing up at his last birthday, or just about anything or any colour you like. Sublimation ink is used to print onto paper, and is then transferred by
heat press to a white neoprene cooler, so any image, font or colour can be transferred.

Wetsuit Coolers also make up artwork for their clients, as well as delivering straight to the clients front door. For info on a free sample, point your browser to Wetsuit Coolers

Stubby Holders

Stubby Holders! I know, to you, it is just something to keep your drink cold. You might even collect them, or know somebody who does. The Stubby Holder is not just something to keep beer cold; to Wetsuit Coolers it is an obsession.

We have an obsession that has taken us on a journey to find the right neoprene, stitching, glue and printing materials. This has lead to an obsession with paper, ink and heat to create a stubby holder that we are happy to put our name on.
We now are using sublimation inks on our stubby holders, and it has taken some time and effort to perfect the technique. We have chosen Roland printers for our printers, which give great results, plus they handle the bulk ink systems for sublimation exceptionally well.
Running CMYK Sublimation Inks, we have developed the techniques to be able to print anything we like on stubby holders, which is a far better system for us than the old Screen Printing techniques from the past.

We can now create stubby holders for customers with photographs on them, as well as logos, text in any color the customer can think of. Wetsuit Coolers were one of the first in Australia to use the sublimation inks on stubby holders, so we pretty much had to keep trying until we perfected the technique.

Once printed on paper, the image is then heat pressed onto white neoprene of the best quality we could find. The transfer from ink, to neoprene was also a technique we had to perfect, with the focus on timing and temperature. The heat pressing component is important for color transfer to be accurate, to match with clients pantone colors.
Once heat pressed the stubby holders are then stitched, glued and packed by hand ready to be shipped straight to the clients’ front door.

For more details plus information on a free sample, follow the link to Wetsuit Coolers