LIV: Re-Branding and Promotion
Background & Target Audience
Lopez Island Vineyards is a small, family-owned winery and vineyard in Washington State. Owners have done a small label or brand re-identity about a decade ago, re-labeling much of their wine with the simple introductory letters “LIV.” There has been a fall-off in sales over the past couple of years. Retail sales are down in restaurants, and wholesale purchases in
stores have lagged. Sales at farmers markets, by contrast, are up.
The company’s wine customers are aging out, and they would like to attract younger drinkers (21-39), as well as to capture back some of the craft cider, craft beer, and craft mixed-drink market, economic substitutes that have recently grown in market share, and therefore,
are competitor products.
Design Problem
The owners want to stay with some of the old features of their brand: in particular, they want to keep the script typeface Byngve LT Bold, which gives them the connection to traditional methods, winemaking history, and Europe that they like to maintain. A new shorthand logo to replace or augment the LIV logo was undertaken, utilizing geometric shapes and simpler forms. This fresh look and distinctive logo will aid further movements into social media marketing and other new media promotion activities. To address the declining restaurant sales in local eateries, project includes “bounce-back coupons,”one in a tri-fold flyer to handout at the popular farmers market stands they maintain, and one as a handout postcard. To promote development of new looks on the crowded wine shelves in local grocery stores—owners reported that their wine was no longer sold in larger market stores—so, a series of fresher looks to go with their new wines they produce annually, is included. A Grape Logo sub-brand and updated Shelf Talker cards to attract the eye of younger grocery aisle shoppers.
Design Process
Research: I studied wine label marketing by “shopping the market,” analyzing the winery’s typeface and design solutions, including email newsletters, wine labels, original source art, website, and grocery store “shelf talkers.” Sketches for the two label directions and alternate wine labels were developed to both freshen the look, and to offer choices to the owners for both logo and wine label designs. Typeface choice of a serif font for body text of Minion Variable Concept was made to allow for leverage of its many family variations (16 weights, fonts, and varieties are available) across a variety of media, downstream; the owners had discussed that they were seeking a new typeface for their website, not happy with the body text typeface that they had ended up with while the developer put up the latest version of their site. Hand-drawn letters and photography were imported and brought into Illustrator and InDesign for integration into the project.
Re-Brand Without Losing the Thread
Winery owners have long cultivated their small winery—the first on their island in the San Juans in Washington State—as being both novel and connected to tradition. Their choices of a steel cut script typeface Byngve LT, for their logotype shows their wish to stay connected to the winemaking traditions that come from Europe. This was the story for the first 25 years.
They had more recently, in the new millenium, shortened the company name on some labels and branding to be simply, “LIV,” a move which makes sense to most people but sometimes triggers a conversation at the Farmers Market sales table about something other than the wine. I felt the logotype was awkwardly kerned, and could either be tightened up and incorporated into a new visual scheme, or switched for a graphic, geometric substitute for the letters LIV. The sketch to the right here is part of an exploration towards that solution.
Dance with Original Artwork
There are reasons why this client has arrived at the final solution that we see here, left, in this red wine label iteration. Red wine labels tend to be darker, heavier in artwork and graphic weight of line, and bolder, in general. Proposition for the red wine line is to branch it out to include illustrations of colored scenes, but a departure from their legacy artwork, done decades ago by one of their contracted artists.
The grape logo icon will be spun off to carry its image on multiple types of lighter wine, such as pink on Rose and Light Green or Gold on White Wines. Using their grape logo and adapting it for the future is a way to keep the thread of the original company going, an important issue for the owner-proprietors.
Winery in Transition
