Someone in your office has already been asked to "make the end-of-year function feel a bit more like us." The usual answer is a step-and-repeat wall nobody photographs and a run of branded napkins that go in the bin by 9pm. Branded ice for corporate events is the cheaper, stranger answer: your logo frozen into the cube in every spirit serve, sitting in a guest's hand at eye level for twenty minutes at a time.
It works. It also has real constraints — freezer access, cube counts, artwork limits — that nobody mentions until you're three days out and short 60 cubes. This is the version with the maths in it.
The cube maths nobody does before they order
This is where most branded-ice plans fall over, so start here rather than at the artwork.
A logo tray produces six 45 mm cubes per fill. A 45 mm cube needs a solid overnight freeze at −18 °C to come out clean and demould without cracking — call it 8 hours, and don't kid yourself that four hours will do it.
Now the guest list. Take a 150-person cocktail function running three hours. Guests average roughly two and a half drinks. That's about 375 drinks. At an Australian corporate event, spirits over ice usually account for somewhere between a quarter and a third of the pour — say 110 rocks serves.
110 branded cubes is 19 tray-fills. One tray, freezing overnight, gets you six a day. You'd need to start nineteen days out, which nobody does.
So the honest planning options are:
- Run multiple trays. Four trays, freezing for three nights before the event, gives you 72 cubes. Six trays over three nights gives 108 — enough to cover the whole night.
- Brand the moment, not the bar. This is what I'd actually recommend for most events. Put branded cubes in the arrival drink and the signature cocktail only, and let the rest of the bar run normal ice. Two trays over three nights covers 36 serves — plenty for the arrival window when everyone's taking photos anyway.
- Brand the top table. For awards nights and board dinners, 20–30 cubes reserved for speakers, sponsors and the head table costs you one tray and gets photographed by the people whose photos matter.
Decide which of those three you're doing before you order. It changes how many trays you buy and how early you start freezing, and it's the difference between a detail that lands and a bar staffer apologising at 8pm.
What it costs against everything else on your branding line
A custom logo tray is $199.95 and it's a fixed asset, not a consumable. That's the whole argument.
Run it against what's already on your event budget. Branded cocktail napkins land somewhere around 15–30 cents each and are seen for eleven seconds. A logo-carved ice block or small sculpture from an event-ice specialist is a several-hundred-dollar line item that's a puddle by 10pm and has to be re-bought for the next event. Custom coasters get left on the table. A step-and-repeat costs more than all of it and only works if you've hired a photographer to stand in front of it.
The tray, by contrast, gets used again. Buy it for the November function, use it again at the March product launch, the June client dinner and every expo stand in between. Twenty fills across a year is 120 branded cubes at about $1.67 each, and the per-cube number keeps falling for as long as the silicone lasts — which is years, not months.
If you're weighing this against the rest of your spend, we went through the same exercise for agencies in event planner branding on a budget.
Artwork: what actually survives at 45 mm
The mould is cut from your artwork, and the usable design area on a 45 mm cube face is roughly 35 mm square. That is small. Marketing teams routinely send a full lockup with a tagline and are surprised when it reads as a grey smudge in a dark room.
What to send, and what to expect:
- File format. Vector is best — .ai, .eps, .svg or a high-resolution PDF. A PNG on a transparent background works if it's at least 1000 px on the long edge. A logo screenshotted off your website will not.
- One colour, solid shapes. The cube has no colour — it has relief. Send the single-colour or reversed version of your mark, the one your brand guidelines call the "mono" or "solid" logo. Gradients, drop shadows and multi-colour lockups all flatten to the same thing.
- Stroke weight. Anything that lands under about 1.5 mm at final size disappears into the frost. Hairline serifs, thin outlines and fine registered-trademark symbols are the usual casualties.
- Character count. A wordmark past roughly twelve characters gets illegible. If your company name is long, use the symbol or the initials — most brands have a monogram version sitting in the brand kit already.
- Test it yourself. Print your logo at 35 mm on white paper and look at it from arm's length. If you can't read it there, it won't read in ice.
For a logo-type-by-logo-type breakdown of what makes it through — monograms, wordmarks, roundels and the lockups we push back on — see custom logo ice cubes: price, specs and ordering.
The trays that take your own artwork are the upload-your-logo tray and the fully custom logo, text and design tray, both $199.95. You'll get a proof back before anything is cut, which is the point at which to argue about stroke weights rather than after.
Lead times, and the November wall
Production is quick — roughly 2–5 business days here in Australia once the artwork proof is signed off, plus delivery. The problem is never the production window. It's everything either side of it.
Build your timeline backwards from the event:
- Event date, minus 3 days: start batch-freezing. Non-negotiable if you need volume.
- Minus 2 weeks: test freeze. Pull one cube, look at it in a glass under the lighting you'll actually have. This is when you find out your logo needed to be 20% bigger.
- Minus 4 weeks: tray in hand.
- Minus 5–6 weeks: place the order and start the artwork proof.
For the Australian end-of-year season that means ordering by mid-October for a late-November or December function. October and November are the crunch — every agency, venue and marketing team in the country is ordering at once, and "2–5 business days" becomes a queue. If your function is in the first fortnight of December, treat late October as your real deadline.
Freezing and transport in a venue you don't control
This is the constraint that catches corporate buyers out and never catches bars out, because a bar owns its freezer and you don't.
Ask about freezer space in writing, early, and get it into the event order. Most function venues will not hand over freezer space on the night — it's full of their own stock, and a verbal "yeah, should be fine" from a sales manager in September means nothing to the chef in December. If the venue can host your trays for three days beforehand, brilliant. Assume they can't.
The fallback works fine. Freeze off-site — your office kitchen freezer is genuinely enough for two or three trays — then transport in a chest esky, packed tight, with frozen gel bricks or a little dry ice. A well-packed esky holds 45 mm cubes for three to four hours, which covers a cross-town run and a load-in. Pack them in a lidded tub rather than loose so they don't fuse into one block.
Two more things worth knowing. Cubes go cloudy when they freeze too fast, and cloudy ice photographs badly — our guide to making clear ice covers the directional-freezing trick, which scales from an office freezer up. And a big cube melts slower than the cracked stuff, so the drink holds up over a long function; there's more on that in why your cocktails go watery.
Three events where branded ice is the wrong call
It doesn't suit everything, and it's cheaper to know that now.
All-sparkling receptions. If the bar is prosecco, beer and wine with a token spirit list, you're branding maybe eight drinks all night. Spend the money on something else.
Outdoor summer events with a long walk. A February rooftop at 34 °C with roving waiters carrying trays across a lawn — the cube is half its size by the time it reaches anyone. Branded ice needs guests reasonably close to the bar.
Anything above about 500 guests where you want full coverage. The freezing logistics stop being a nice detail and start being a second job. At that scale, brand the VIP room and the sponsor bar and leave the main bar alone.
Worth noting the flip side: the Australian business events sector generates around $36 billion in direct economic benefit and employs roughly 229,000 people, according to the Australian Business Events Association. It's a crowded, professionalised market, and small tactile details are one of the few levers left that a mid-sized budget can actually pull.
Which tray for which kind of event
All of these are handmade in Australia from food-grade platinum silicone, take your logo, and produce the same 45 mm branded cube. They're all $199.95. The difference is which use case they're set up for.
- Upload your logo or design — the general-purpose option. Best if you want one tray that works across the Christmas function, the launch and next year's conference.
- Trade show and expo cubes — built for stand activations, where a branded drink walks your logo around the rest of the floor.
- Branded promotional barware — for sponsorships and brand activations where the drink itself is the advertising.
- Fully custom logo, text and design — if you want a date, a milestone or an event name alongside the mark. Good for anniversaries, awards nights and one-off launches.
The full branded ice cube tray range is here, and if you're pairing the function with something the client takes home, the corporate Christmas gift guide covers that side. You can also just browse everything.
Frequently asked questions
What's the minimum order for branded event ice?
One tray. There's no minimum quantity and no setup fee beyond the tray price of $199.95 — it's a reusable mould, not a print run. Most corporate events order two to four so they can freeze enough cubes in parallel.
How far ahead do I need to order for a December function?
Order by mid-October. Production is about 2–5 business days once artwork is approved, but October and November are the busiest weeks of the Australian year for this, and you want two spare weeks to test-freeze before the event.
What artwork file do I need to supply?
A vector file (.ai, .eps, .svg or high-res PDF) or a PNG at 1000 px or larger on a transparent background. Send the single-colour version of your logo — the cube renders relief, not colour — and check that nothing in it is thinner than about 1.5 mm at 35 mm wide.
Is the silicone food-safe?
Yes. The trays are made from food-grade platinum-cure silicone, which is the standard for food-contact moulds under the Food Standards Australia New Zealand code. Wash in warm soapy water before first use.
How many times can we reuse a tray?
Years, with normal handling. Platinum silicone doesn't go brittle or sticky the way cheap silicone does, and it releases cleanly, which matters more than you'd think when a staff member is demoulding 60 cubes at 4pm.
Can we use the same tray for more than one brand?
No — the design is cut into the mould, so one tray equals one design. Agencies running multiple client activations usually buy a tray per client and bill it through as a production cost.
What ordering actually involves
A branded order starts at one tray, $199.95, with no minimum quantity — you send your logo as a vector or high-resolution PNG, approve a proof, and production runs about 2–5 business days plus delivery within Australia. Allow four weeks door-to-door so you have time to test-freeze, and for the Australian end-of-year function season order by mid-October for anything happening in late November or December. Bulk pricing applies on larger orders if you need several trays to hit your cube count.
Start with the branded ice cube tray collection, or read the venue-side version of this in branded ice for bars if you're setting it up as an ongoing service rather than for one night.