Hey guys,
It has nothing to do with saving money on the art: even if we did think like that (which we don't), it was already owned by C&D. And there's no production cost difference between artsy labels and simpler labels: full color printing is full color printing.
We're just trying to organize the line a little bit so that it's more intelligible and manageable for C&D's customers. I'm not sure how obvious this is because we've been doing it in bits and pieces (largely because it's something of an epic project). I think Captain Bob's is the only one that went from having a cartoon label to the standardized label; the other cartoon labels have either been refreshed slightly (the Simply Elegant series), completely redone (the Servicemen series; Autumn Evening; Briar Fox), or have yet to be reworked, though we have plans to do so.
C&D's catalog is massive. It used to be slightly more massive, but it's still huge. We're trying to group things into series, each of which has some common theme, and make sure everything has artwork; we're also trying to maintain the feel of the original artwork while sprucing it up. Since we've been doing it piecemeal, the end goal probably isn't all that intuitively obvious, but that's all we're trying to do.
As for the blends, nothing has changed.
Best,
Sykes
