Maries Bihantverk AB is a small-scale beekeeping, located in Malmö at the southern part of Sweden. Marie Backmann, the woman behind everything, is a passionate professional beekeeper with a positive attitude that loves nature, bees and the fact of crafting something plus passing it along to others. With Primera’s LX500e she found a label printer that makes her honey labels stand out at retail.
Maries Bihantverk AB is known for its beehives all over Malmö and the carefully handled honey with well-preserved ingredients, bottled without any heating. Marie was working as Graphic Designer for many years but decided to leave the life at her desk and computer behind to add some more crafting and manual work to her daily working life. She started the education as a beekeeper and successfully graduated with a journeyman’s certificate in 2017. True to her motto “beekeeping in harmony with bees and nature” she dedicated her life to the bees.
As a teacher she imparts her values and knowledge to the students at the beekeeper school in Malmö, but her passion also lies in the future of our children. With a lovely illustrated children book about the story of bees (“Stora boken om bin”) she’s weekly giving refugees and their children an understanding of beekeeping in the city and what contribution the bees are to the biosphere in Malmö’s green areas.
“You’re more an ambassador of the bees instead of ‘just a bee-keeper’,” emphasizes Lea König, Product Manager at DTM Print, and Marie Backman adds proudly: “Yes, that’s what I am: an ambassador of the bees. Beekeeping is astonishingly important as bees do an outstanding pollination work no species could do better plus they collect nectar for incredibly good fresh honey. I see the children as our future and a future without bees wouldn’t be a future. It’s important to show them all the biodiversity we have in Malmö and that nature is a major part of society.”
Speaking of incredibly good fresh honey, it’s available through resellers in the market hall of Lund and Malmö as well as through a direct trade group between producers and consumers in Sweden called “REKO-ring”. Honey coming from Maries Bihantverk AB is bottled in jars of different sizes and types. When it came to labelling she was searching for an easy to handle label printing solution that works with ecological looking labels, with a small foot-print to fit in her office shelf and has a driver for Mac OS X.
Marie became familiar with Primera label printers at the trade show “Natural Products Scandinavia” in 2017. Here she saw the LX500e live in action and learnt more about the advantages of the printer. She was convinced that the easy-to-use tri-colour cartridge with built-in printhead would simplify her workflow of printing her well designed labels. Previously she used her desktop office printer with A4 label sheets, with the disadvantage of positioning the labels properly and throwing away unused A4 sheets where only a few labels were left.
Marie was delighted about the possibility of printing on-demand personalised, seasonal and promotional labels from one label to hundreds. “As a trained Graphic Designer I’m designing the label artwork on my own. It’s great to print just one label as a design proof without any lead times or wasted materials, just to see if it looks nice,” says Marie smiling. “I’m recommending the LX500e to all my beekeeper students in school as it’s perfect for small businesses and start-up with its low investment and no maintenance costs,” she continues.
In May 2018 the time was right and Marie Backman decided to buy the LX500e for the honey labels of the upcoming season.
With her local Swedish DTM Print distributor UNIPRINT (former Absurd Ideas AB) she felt in very good hands. “She loved the label printer from the first minute and couldn’t wait to start printing with it,” tells Christian Almstedt from Absurd Ideas. With the huge variety of label materials provided by DTM Print it was not an easy choice for her to choose a substrate, but in the end she decided for the “DTM Vintage Paper Eco” to highlight the ecological and nature-loving part of her work and honey.
“My customised size for the vintage labels was a very easy and fast process. Also I realised that I need as well some round matte labels for the mustard, I’ll add to my portfolio shortly. I was pretty impressed to have them delivered the following workday,” says Marie happily.
It is always lovely to see how label printers cheer up the work routine of people. Speaking about market positioning of Maries Bihantverk’s honey and her graphic design skills I believe it was essential to print unique textured labels on-demand, that highlight the honey on each product shelf.” says Lea König from DTM Print.
It gives each of us the opportunity to be the father or mother of 1000 worker bees and follow the life in the hive and in the end taste the harvest from your “own” bee colony as one jar of the first harvest. The bee-fathers (and of course bee-mothers) will receive the first honey in 2019, each jar labelled with the individual name or number of the bee-parent. The hives are managed by Marie and two additional local professional beekeepers (Susanna and Katarina).
They also receive their labels (and their design) from Marie and her LX500e label printer. DTM Print and UNIPRINT are happy to support Maries Bihantverk in the future and contributed their small part against bee mortality. They both took the chance of becoming a “Bifadder” and look forward to receiving the first jar of summer honey in 2019!
