After building a suite of branding and labels for our client Peerick Wines, Starship was asked to create a new standalone brand for the winery’s 2019 Viognier variety: an off-premises, accessible wine brand for millennials called “Vee On Yay”.
Challenges
Viognier is not a well-known wine in Australia except to the rare people "in the know". Millennials who might be casual drinkers or people who aren't solidly clued into the wine business are generally unaware of what viognier is (a mix of a buttery Chardonnay, with a splash of Savvy Blanc) and might decide not to try it. Comparisons to existing wines are often not helpful for this target market either, as millennials tend to look for the new, exciting - something different. Hence our rather radical (for the rather staid wine business) creative direction.
Roadmap
Using a phonetic reading of the word Viognier, our development of the brand took a fresh, revolutionary approach. Starship was aware that we needed to engage a younger audience who have drunk white wines like Chardonnay, but who are often risk-adverse to trying something they haven't heard of before.
Modern pop-art references, along with 70s protest imagery, strongly influenced the final design artwork. Bold colours on a single white wraparound label were chosen for the core reason of standing out at shelf level. Coupled with large typography - literally being shouted from a pair of lips - helped cement the brand’s message of revolution.
After careful workshopping of language choices that could show Viognier as the next exciting trend in wine, we used the back “blurb” to illustrate Vee On Yay as “crashing the party”, as the “punchy white wine disruptor for platters, picnics and parties, and “exciting to drink and talk about” - summed up nicely by a branding line: “If Chardonnay was evolution, Vee On Yay is revolution!”
Results
Vee On Yay is available at select stores and selling very well.
It tastes great, if we say so ourselves. Check it out.
Skillsets
- Project management
- Art Direction
- Brand strategy and concept development
- Language and tone development
- Packaging design
- Illustration and graphic design
- Copywriting
- User Experience (UX)
- Front-End website development
- Content development, management and creative execution