Confirmed Wines is a new brand designed to break into the untapped customer experience of African American men. Using Damian Lillard as a guiding light, this wine seeks to initiate the uninitiated into the wine world. It’s passionate, sophisticated, and eminent. You won’t find a wine like this anywhere else.
Throughout this project, I lead a team of MBA students at E&J Gallo to create an incredible new wine brand. I created a few workshops to define the brand’s core values, get confirmation and input from the MBA students, and then create several mood boards to direct them towards the brand they wanted to create. We started by defining our customer experience. Who are they? What do they want? The board below was created to define our customers’ core values.
Mood Boards
After reviewing with the MBA team, I created 4 mood boards. I was worried about this being too many options for such a young team though and reached out to my colleagues to refine the options. A quick review narrowed the options down to two. These two vision boards were presented to the team. While both boards present a rich experience, they focus on two different things. Option one looked more at the combination of wealth and art. Option two focused on inspiration through living. The MBA team chose to move forward with option two for the customer experience
Logo & Bottle Design
On to the next stage of the process! How can I translate such an intense vision board to a wine bottle? To overcome this I tried a few different strategies but ultimately focused on creating a recognizable logo. The final design combined the letters in Damian Lillard’s name to create a stunning look that resembled a basketball logo.
I then combined the logo with the name of the wine, “Confirmed”. I still needed that luxurious feel though and struggle with how to do that other than a gold coloring. That didn’t feel like enough though so I met again with the MBA team. They asked me to emulate some of the textures in the vision board such as marble, smoke, and brick. I overlayed those textures both on the logo and the wine name. In the end, Confirmed with a golkd overlay and smoke texture felt the best. The logo and the name were combined in a vertical design that would fit the label, then the MBA team reviewed again.
Finally we could focus on the back of the bottle. The MBA team requested a simple design due to time constraints. I decided to finalize the design with Damian Lillard’s signature and not much else! Add a wax dip to continue with feeling of luxury and the bottle design was complete. A new brand designed to break into the untapped customer experience of African American men had been created.
Here’s some of my other package designs if you’d like to take a look: