The Australian stubby holder is one of the most-given and least-thought-about objects in the country. Every backyard, every esky, every wedding favour table, every sports club fundraiser. The category has existed since the 1970s and the basic neoprene-sleeve format hasn't changed much since. What did change, recently, is what gets printed on it. For most of the category's history, the stubby holder was a flat colour with a logo slapped on it. Then a Melbourne brand decided beer can art deserved better — that the stubby holder around the can should match the visual energy of the can itself — and built a manufacturing operation to deliver it. Stubbyz launched in 2020, became the first stubby holder brand stocked online at Bunnings two years later, and has since quietly become the only one of its kind to also sit on the shelves at Dan Murphy's. The brand is owned by the founders of Printwear, which is the reason this article is on this blog rather than someone else's.
The "since 1972" thing
Open the Stubbyz site and you'll see "since 1972" attached to the brand. The brand actually launched in 2020. The 1972 is the birth year of one of the founders, and the tagline is a long-running joke about the brand being older than most of the people drinking from it. We mention this up front because the rest of the article assumes you're in on the gag.
The brief that started it
The original problem Stubbyz was built to solve was visual rather than functional. By 2020, Australian craft beer can art had levelled up dramatically — Mountain Goat, Stone & Wood, Pirate Life, Stomping Ground, the explosion of small breweries each treating their can as a canvas. The cans themselves were beautiful. The stubby holders covering them up were not. Generic colours, generic prints, generic neoprene. Nobody had thought about what it would mean to put real art on a stubby holder, the way the breweries themselves were putting real art on the cans inside.
Stubbyz built itself around that gap. Heavyweight neoprene, four-stitched binding tape that doesn't fray, vivid full-coverage prints, and — for the consumer range — a deliberately curated set of designs treated as actual artwork rather than stock graphics. The brand is manufactured in Melbourne and carries Certified Australian Made® registration, which most of the cheap import alternatives don't.
The Bunnings shelf — and what it means
In August 2022, Bunnings approached Stubbyz about stocking the brand. Stubbyz launched online at bunnings.com.au shortly after, and remains the first and only stubby holder brand sold through Bunnings. Dan Murphy's followed. For anyone who knows Australian retail, this is genuinely meaningful — the bar for getting onto either retailer's shelf is high, and the bar for being the only example of your category to clear that bar is much higher.
What the Bunnings and Dan Murphy's listings prove is that Stubbyz operates as a real consumer brand rather than as a B2B promotional product wearing consumer clothing. The product is sold to drinkers, not just to breweries. That distinction matters because it changes everything about how the brand thinks about its designs, its sizes, its packaging, and its commercial structure.
The product range
The Stubbyz consumer range covers three core sizes. The Standard fits 345–375ml cans and bottles — the format most Australian beers come in. The Slim fits 275–330ml European-style bottles and skinny cans (Asahi, Peroni, Heineken, Carlton Dry, the seltzer category). The One Size is the universal solution that fits both — a baseless, overlocked design built for festivals and venues where guests bring whatever they brought.
For custom and bulk work, the range expands to six sizes: Standard, Tallboy (for the 500ml craft beer can format), Slim, Slim High, Mini, and Craft/Wide. The Tallboy is worth flagging — most generic stubby holders don't fit a 500ml craft can properly, leaving the can sliding around in a sleeve sized for a 375ml. Stubbyz built one specifically.
The consumer designs sit on stubbyz.com.au in singles, 2-packs, 3-packs, and 4-packs — both pre-made and "Make Your Own" mix-and-match across designs and sizes. The 4-pack is the gifting format and the one that does most of the commercial work. We come back to that below.
Why the 4-pack is the format that matters
This is the structural insight that separates Stubbyz from the rest of the category. A single stubby holder is, almost regardless of the design, a token. Eight dollars, fifteen dollars, depending on the design and the channel — it lands as a small object the recipient might use at the next BBQ or might not. Four stubby holders together, picked deliberately, with designs that mean something to the recipient — a surf range, a tropical range, a brewery range — is a gift. The unit economics of going from one to four don't quadruple the cost in real terms, but the perceived value roughly does.
The 4-pack is also the format that solves the "what do I get them" gift problem in a category where the obvious answers are exhausted. A bottle of wine. A candle. A scented something. Four Stubbyz designed around the recipient's actual interests — surfing, beer, dogs, whatever — is a more specific gift in the same price range. It works for birthdays, Father's Days, Christmas stocking fillers, groomsmen gifts, hens parties. It works because four objects working together communicate effort, even when each one cost the same as the equivalent single.
The artist collabs
Two of Stubbyz's recent drops are worth knowing about, because they signal where the brand sits in the wider Australian creative landscape rather than just the merch landscape.
Stubbyz × Paul McNeil launched as a four-design limited-edition collection. McNeil is the legendary Mambo artist whose work defined Australian surf graphics through the 1990s and whose record covers for Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Beck, Pavement, and Fugazi sit in the music history of the period. The Stubbyz collab brought designs like "Beer Wave" and "Very Thirsty" — surf-inspired, exactly in McNeil's signature register — to the stubby holder format. For anyone who grew up wearing Mambo or buying surf magazines in the late 90s, the collab reads as a small piece of Australian commercial art history landing on a working object.
Stubbyz × Mulga is the more recent, more vivid drop — also four designs, also limited-edition, available in a defined window each year. Mulga is Joel Moore, the Sydney-based artist who left finance in 2014 to become a full-time illustrator and has since collaborated with Coca-Cola, Adidas, Toyota, Microsoft, Slurpee, Subaru, and Havaianas. His signature style — bright, intricate line-work, beardy characters, tropical animals — translates onto neoprene better than almost any other contemporary Australian artist's work, because the format rewards exactly the bold-colour, character-driven approach that defines his apparel and mural work.
What both collabs signal: Stubbyz isn't a stock-graphics business with a marketing budget. It's a brand that artists at the top of Australian commercial illustration are willing to put their name on. That credibility radiates back across the rest of the range.
Where it ends up
The Stubbyz product is now sold across multiple Australian retail channels — direct via stubbyz.com.au, Bunnings online, Dan Murphy's, and at brewery taprooms and venues across the country that order custom-decorated runs through Printwear's B2B side. The same manufacturing line produces both the consumer drops and the custom brewery merch. That's part of what makes the brand work commercially — Stubbyz pioneered the playful design DNA, and that design DNA carries across into the custom work that breweries, festivals, sports clubs, and venues commission.
For most readers of this blog — creators, founders, label owners, indie brand operators — the relevant questions about Stubbyz are usually two. First: how do you get one for yourself? The consumer designs are at stubbyz.com.au, and the 4-pack is the format that lands hardest as a gift. Second: how do you get one for your own brand? That's the brewery-merch and custom-decoration conversation, and it's the subject of separate articles on this site.
For the broader question — why does any of this matter — the answer is that the stubby holder is one of the few merch formats where a really well-designed object has the same shelf life as a really well-built one, because both end up in the same backyard for years. Most categories of merchandise either survive on craft (a great hat, a great hoodie) or on utility (a great bottle, a great notebook). The stubby holder is one of the few that survives on both, and Stubbyz is one of the few brands that takes both seriously.
Following independent Australian brands? Subscribe to Retail — Printwear's weekly newsletter for brand founders, creators, and independent labels across Australia and New Zealand.