Personalised festival cups carry your event branding, cut single-use waste, and go home as souvenirs. Order them right and they pay for themselves several times over. Order them badly and you run out on Saturday night. Here is how to get it right.
We are Drinksmate. We make personalised festival cups out of our factory in Stockton-on-Tees, and we have shipped more than ten million of them in the past three years. We have seen what works at events of every size, and everything below is what we tell organisers when they call.
How many cups do you actually need?
This is the question that makes or breaks a festival order. The mistake is ordering one cup per drink expected, which massively over-orders. A reusable cup serves up to 250 drinks across a weekend before it is washed and packed away, so you order for peak concurrent demand, not total drinks sold. As a rough rule, a 10,000 cup print run comfortably covers a 50,000 attendance event run on a deposit-return or wash-and-reuse model.
When you are between two volumes, round up to the next tier. The per-cup price drops at each tier, so the extra cups are cheap, and running dry mid-event is far more expensive in lost bar sales and goodwill than a few hundred spare cups in the store. Our festival cup planning guide has the full quantity maths.
Choosing the right cup
Cup size drives bar throughput. Pint to line cups hold 568ml at the line with room for a head, and are your workhorse for beer and cider. Pint to brim maximises soft drinks and cocktails. Half pints (280ml) suit wine, spirits and lower-strength serves. Two pint cups are the queue-buster: one trip to the bar, two rounds carried, which noticeably reduces peak-time congestion. Stackable formats save space behind the bar and in storage. The cup sizes guide matches each format to its job.
Print method: single colour vs full colour IML
Single colour screen print is the cheaper route for a single weekend and simple one-colour branding. Full colour IML fuses the design into the cup wall during moulding, survives hundreds of washes without fading or peeling, and carries no per-colour upcharge, so a full-colour artwork costs the same to print as a one-colour logo. For deposit-return schemes and cups reused across seasons, IML is the right call. More on the method on our IML printing page, and the design side is covered in how to design personalised festival cups.
Running a deposit-return scheme
Deposit-return is where personalised festival cups earn their keep. Punters pay a small deposit on their first drink, return the cup to redeem it or keep it as a souvenir, and the cups cycle through the wash for reuse. It slashes litter, cuts waste-removal costs, and the unredeemed deposits often cover a chunk of the cup cost. For this to work the cup has to survive repeated washing, so specify IML print and a durable model, and UKCA marked pint to line cups let you serve a regulated pint at the bar.
Timing and lead times
Standard production is 10 working days from artwork sign-off. Eco Saver is 25 working days at our lowest unit price, which is the route most festivals take when ordering for next season, and where the cheapest cups live. Plain unbranded stock ships in 5 working days, and genuine sub-48-hour emergencies go through our sister site Express Cups. The single most common cause of a late festival order is internal artwork sign-off slipping, not the factory, so lock your design down early.
Pricing and getting started
Pricing is volume-driven, with tiers at 50, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 plus. At high volume our cheapest cup is the half pint single colour on Eco Saver, at 33 pence per cup at 2,000 units. For exact pricing on your cup, print and quantity, use the quote form below. We reply inside the hour with a price, lead time and free 3D digital proof, and our price promise means we will beat any like-for-like quote by 10%. Browse the personalised festival cups range or the wider festival cups page to choose a cup first.