Sterkstokers, a distillery based in Brecht, Belgium, offers customers a personalized and bespoke spirit distilling experience where individuals and brands can create their own alcohol flavor blends and design their own unique personalized 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 flavored 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 flavors 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 color. 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 flavorings, 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 personalized 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 personalized 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 personalized experience that Sterkstokers offers its customers isn’t well-suited to this approach. Recognizing this, Thomas began experimenting with DTO printing options, catching the attention of his customers while 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 flavors, 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 colors the design and the text,” says Thomas. 

Reflecting on some of his favorite 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.”  

The ability to cost effectively print just one bottle or produce small batches of high-quality printed bottles has not only lent itself perfectly to Sterkstokers’ personalization model, but it has also enabled Thomas to boost sales and marketing by being able to print examples of designs to show to prospective customers. He says: “For new customers, now we can just print one bottle with their logo on it. With the printed label this was impossible. You had to order and wait two weeks. Now we can create really nice high-quality single bottle pieces, and when we offer that to our prospects so many people already see what it will be, and that works very well for sales.”  

Beautiful bespoke bottles with ‘oomph’ for Sterkstoker customers 

Anke Joosen, a Sterkstokers customer, used the power of direct-to-object printing to create a special limited edition run of gin bottles to celebrate a local flower festival, Bloemencorso Loenhout. Anke came up with the idea to feature the dahlia, a flower used in the float displays each year, both as a flavor within her personalized gin and in the design for the bottle, settling on a complete corsage design with the dahlias curving around the bottle. 

Describing the response to the bottle, Anke says: “It gives more of an oomph to the bottle because you see all kinds of bottles all over the world with just the label on top of it, but this gives it more cachet and something extra.” 

After the success of the 2024 Festival’s limited edition gin bottle, Anke plans to create a new design annually. The design for the 2025 event is already well underway, this time using a black bottle featuring pink flowers for the design.  

Another example of innovative design paired with direct-to-object printing to create a ‘wow’ factor for spirit bottles is a collaboration between Sterkstokers and Bar Woest, a local summer bar. Having worked with larger spirit brands, co-founder Joppe Ruts began working with Thomas in 2024 in order to feature more local products. Coinciding with Bar Woest’s fifth year this year, Thomas and Joppe embarked on a new venture together - the launch of a new bar location on the river next to Sterkstokers’ distillery and a limited edition run of Bar Woest-branded gin bottles to mark the occasion. 

Joppe says: “A lot of people ask us ‘Can I have the empty bottles please, because I like the design so much!’ I think in the near future we will make our own liquor for this bar too and use the same technique. It’s easy and it’s beautiful, and it doesn’t feel like mass production.”  

These reactions from customers are testament to the high quality of the Inkcups direct-to-object printing capabilities for spirits bottles and demonstrate how DTO-printed bottles leave a lasting impression long after they have been consumed, as collector’s items, decorative pieces, and event memorabilia. A company that has always had its finger on the pulse of innovation, Sterkstokers has capitalized on all the benefits DTO printing has to offer, and has boosted the success of its personalization business in doing so. On what’s next for the company, Thomas indicates there may be a second Helix ONE® on the horizon for the business in the not too distant future. As Wim highlighted, the only limitation for this company is the imagination of its customers.