Bite Size: Repear

This is, again, a label that was sold from part of a collection that went on the market  in early 2008 which I mention in this post.

This was just before I came on the Kiwiana scene and was an archive kept by an ex-marketing manager who had worked at Wattie’s through the 1950s to the 1970s.

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It was snatched up by two or so buyers, I am told, who are now releasing bits and pieces from it. All in all, I probably managed to get about ten from two different sellers this year so far, but it’s obvious they are not the best stuff – and these earlier and rare ones which I think date from the mid-late fifties, were way out of my price range.
It took me over a day of work to recreate this from a snapshot, painting the illustration digitally. There is a whole bunch of them in this fruit/fruit juice range but it’s such painstaking, time consuming work that it’s going to take me a long time to get around to finishing all of them. Anything with an illustration takes forever to do.
But there’s something quite satisfying about bringing back a long-gone piece of art from the dead that may otherwise never be seen again, once it’s gone to a private collector.

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I previously posted on a little of the history of the Wattie’s company and the Frimley’s brand here, but there’s more to cover – as well as history of the other brands that it eventually acquired: Kirkpatrick, K, Playtime, Thomson & Hill, and Oak to name some well-known labels of the past that were snatched up and assimilated.

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