What’s not to love about a promo that offers up recipes for delicious beverages alongside incredible embellishments?

Let’s get this straight. Neenah, Stephen, Sirio, Splendorgel, Ispira, Crane’s Lettra – they’re like the supermodels of the specialty paper world. Supermodels look great, without make-up. These papers look great, without embellishments. But, as make-up artists the world over would attest to, what if we took that innate beauty and just added a bit of bling? What could we transform them into?

This was the idea behind our latest beautiful promo, Alchemy. To take a sample pack of selected heavier weight Fedrigoni and Neenah paper stocks and show just what can be achieved with embellishments such as foiling, letterpress, embossing, debossing and form-cutting. It was also our little way of showing off the brand new Stephen colour pallet…

“We wanted to provide a resource that showed what could be achieved with some of our heavyweight speciality stocks,” comments Kerry Sodaitis, Marketing Co-ordinator. “Traditionally these stocks are used for invitations, menus, business cards, and they always deliver. But we wanted to show anything was possible, that they could be transformed into something else. And that’s where the name Alchemy came from.”

And so it is, a transformation, transmutation of these stocks into something else. With the added bonus of some very theatrical cocktail recipes.

“We got the idea of using cocktails and coasters when thinking about the end use of the product,” says Annie MacInnes, Graphic Designer at Melbourne’s Liquorice. “We imagined the users mixing and matching a variety of stocks
and finishes, in a similar way to selecting and mixing ingredients in a recipe. So we thought mixing cocktails would be a nice and
playful correlation.”

This also meant that the pack then had a dual function, enabling us to feature recipes for the cocktails and make the actual stock samples coasters that are able to be used (though you probably wouldn’t, they are just too pretty).

“We had a lot of fun picking the cocktail recipes,” adds Annie.
“The chosen recipes either have an interesting process in their creation, an unusual ingredient or a special finishing touch such as edible gold flakes, bacon strip garnish or a smoking sprig of rosemary. That extra touch can make a big difference, to a recipe or a stock.”

This of course ties in with the concept of embellishment and the power designers have to be alchemists in their own right…

Spicers Alchemy has been designed by Liquorice, with print and production by Gunn & Taylor, and Letterpress by The Hungry Workshop.

See for yourself the magic of Alchemy.