Alright, I'll do my best on this. A couple of quick things before I seriously launch into it. Our goal is to make C&D better. I think we've already done a lot towards that end. And, I write yet again, we're not doing away with the blend specific artwork. Not all of it is staying the same, but with the exception of Captain Bob's Blend (explanation to follow), everything that used to have full artwork will continue to have full artwork.
1) On Captain Bob's Blend's artwork. I was unaware of a special deal that Craig made with Bob regarding the artwork. That's not Bob's fault; it's mine. Part of the challenge with C&D is that there were about four exceptions to every rule and nineteen side amendments to every relationship. Craig kept all that in his head. I'm pretty sure that there are huge chunks of that information that were never passed to Chris. It worked fine for Craig, both because C&D was a lot smaller then, and because Craig was really good at keeping certain sorts of information straight in his head. I was certainly unaware (read on) that Bob had paid separately for the artwork.
When we started (and by we, I mean mostly Chris, Keith and I, with help from others at Laudisi) trying to make sense of everything at C&D, we organized the blends into different mental buckets: blends that were just tinned, blends that were just bulk, blends that were bulk, but occasionally tinned, and blends that were tinned, but occasionally also in bulk. Within those, they might come in as many as six or seven different formats.
We used the 'generic' new artwork to replace the old generic artwork--the labels that had either been typed (yeah, literally, with a typewriter) or printed on a laser printer.
We screwed up with Captain Bob's blend and didn't realize it wasn't with all of the other bulks and we'd made the new artwork for it and printed that artwork before we realized otherwise. C&D has a very long tail of blends that it makes pretty tiny quantities of (our minimum run is less than 1% the size of Mac Baren or Orlik's minimum run size) and CBB is pretty far along that tail.
2) On the cartoon artwork in general:
Some of it is changing, some of it is staying as close to the original as we can, some is not changing. But, if it had full artwork before, it will continue to do so. Here's the story:
For blends that had any artwork, C&D had artwork for 2oz labels and sometimes had artwork for round stickers. The round stickers were used for all sorts of purposes, with a blank space left to write in the weight (so they could go on 8oz tins, 100g tins, 16oz tins, 16oz bags, 16oz vacuumed bags etc). We didn't like the round labels for a handful of reasons: 1) They looked ugly on the blue backing paper on 8oz tins, 2) there was no room for a blend description on those tins. Sometimes C&D applied the description to the back, separately printed, sometimes they didn't. Either way, no one (at least, no one at C&D or Laudisi) liked the 8oz tins with the round sticker labels (and there were a handful of business-y reasons we didn't like them too: they were fiddly, so applying them was slow and results were uneven and they were expensive).
We also received flat pdf files of the labels, not the original artwork that was created for the labels. In order to make nice 8oz labels, we had a couple of options:
Redesign, but heavily incorporating the original:
http://assets.smokingpipes.com/images/products-hr/003-016-0038.jpg
Shoehorning of existing artwork into new 8oz format (basically no change to 2oz, but making a proper 8oz label):
http://assets.smokingpipes.com/images/CD_Tin_Art/RNON-1692.pdf
http://assets.smokingpipes.com/images/CD_Tin_Art/RNON-1588.pdf
Complete re-imagining of the artwork:
http://assets.smokingpipes.com/images/CD_Tin_Art/RNON-1634.pdf
http://assets.smokingpipes.com/images/CD_Tin_Art/RNON-1816.pdf
What we did where depended on a lot of different factors:
1) How would the original work out on an 8oz label?
2) How good (yes, in our opinion) was the original? Was it iconic (Cross-Eyed Cricket)? Was it terribly busy (5 O'Clock Shadow)?
3) Did we think we could do something better?
But, with the exception of Captain Bob's Blend, if it had full-blown custom artwork before, it will continue to do so. Mostly it's not changing or not changing much.
We can revisit CBB once we get the rest of the line sorted (and we're starting to get close).
Sykes
