INSITE
Strategy, brand creation & design.
Mason Vineyard
How Insite carved a new approach for Mason Vineyard; a new winery in an emerging wine category in Niagara.
Mason Vineyard is a preeminent Canadian winery which launched in 2021. Founded by nationally acclaimed winemaker Kelly Mason, the small batch Niagara winery focuses on Burgundian varieties grown in low yields from meticulous and natural viticulture. Wines are produced with low intervention, no manipulation, wild fermentation and no filtration — fitting the wines and approach into a small but growing group of Canadian wines that are recognized globally.
Client
Mason Vineyard
2021–2024 (3 years)
Engagement
Beamsville, Ontario, Canada
Location
Brand Strategy — Naming — Visual Identity — Label Design — Packaging — Portfolio Strategy — Hospitality Experience — Digital Strategy — Customer Relationship Strategy — Allocation Strategy — Customer List Management Program
Services
Each vintage complete sellout before next, National recognition and Media attention
Outcome
Behind every good brand is a strong strategy.
What you don’t see
The reality of our business, this strategy and brand solutions gig, is that few people know what we do as a result of our work being mostly invisible.
Sure, you can thumb through our insta and web feeds to see familiar successful wine labels, delicious beer cans, progressive retail interiors, and loads of design work — but the larger extent of what we do is in the lead up to those designs, which you don’t see.
So if you have a moment, the following is a case study of one unique brand build and support contract. And I say unique because our solutions are always bespoke, tailored to suit each client's needs and challenges.
When the strategy and the brand exist as one.
Insite designed a precise and sophisticated, highly recognizable identity and label system for Mason Vineyard which could project the feeling of timelessness while quickly building recognition and trust.
Pedigree, authenticity, terroir and an overt sense of place are key elements of the Mason Vineyard brand. Consequently tactile emotive details are key such as this wine row post marker that connects to Mason’s online vineyard map
Build in the uniqueness
Poised to emerge as one of Canada’s most prominent winemakers, Kelly Mason engaged us to build a new brand and operating wine company from the ground up.
Because of our extensive knowledge of brand building in the alc/bev vertical, and in particular the wine segment, we had strong strategic ideas on how her new company could operate with a minimum of resources while achieving maximum impact in a relatively short period of time compared to most other new wineries. Our belief is that wineries starting in today’s economic climate, as well as highly competitive landscape, have a short time window to succeed and to grow to keep their audience’s attention and gain foundational market position. Therefore a strategy was conceived that would help Mason Vineyard hustle.
We proposed a brand and business strategy that were sewn together so that all business activities and approaches would speak to and align with the brand itself. This way, the lean manner in which the business would operate would make sense to the audience's perception of the brand and the brand’s goals.
Following the brand development, we created an identity and package program that spoke of the brand’s simplicity, modernity and straight forward honest strength. Mason Vineyard exists only to make exceptional wine — and so the look and feel of the identity needed to convey the same no nonsense message which the audience could connect with and stand behind Mason's simple goal on an emotional level.
Following identity, we created the content strategy and developed content to convey a specific set of stories and key emotional themes that supported the brand and audience’s understanding of the wine and difference in the category. We managed this content in social media as well as developed the website and other communication tools.
Communication is the brand
In addition to communication, we devised a process of integrated communication and sales tools to streamline the sales and marketing end of the brand – a system that could be easily managed and operated by a skeleton crew — and would support the brand’s assertion that they are in the business of making exceptional wine, not in the business of marketing wine — so a lean sales and communication process to connect with the audience and facilitate sales is necessary and the audience’s agreeable participation in the operation of the system is critical.
The end goal of the brand and its processes is to make it easier for this extraordinary winemaker to make beautiful wine from their incredible terroir for the audience to love — and towards this end the business system needs to reduce the effort to communicate, market and get wine into audience's hands with the ultimate target of selling out all of the wines in the release year, as early as possible, and to eventually pre-sell the wines, further reducing the burden of marketing costs.
Successes
Four years in, the outcome of the project has been a great success in many fronts. The brand has been very well received and is perceived as justifiably top tier. Importantly, audience reaction has been above industry norms resulting in a rate of sales well ahead of peer wineries of similar ultra-premium positioning, but which are well in their 10 to 15 year mark.
The effort to communicate and market the Mason Vineyard wines is substantially less effort than peers as the brand has established a “pull” phase — attracting and building up ideal engaged target audiences — versus the typical beginner “push” phase of searching for audiences and qualifying if they are the right fit.
Being in the pull phase allows the winery to focus on continuing brand differentiation and fulfilling its promises while expanding its volume without needing to scale up the marketing. This allows the winery to increase volumes to suit the desire and graceful pace of the winemaker / viticulturists as well as to support the maturing profit needs of the winery — versus when wineries are stuck in the pull phase, they need to scale volume as a desperate measure to cover increasing marketing and hospitality activity costs which in turn promote increasing production volumes which often don't make sense to the brand message, winemaker’s abilities or the pace of the vineyard. All which result in lower quality wines, decreased differentiation and ultimately brand derailment.
Convert typical challenges to opportunities
Challenges:
Break Norms: Startup winery needing to fast track the typical startup winery slow growth cycle
Business Efficiency: Mason was a self financed, founder operated business which meant resources were precious so the winery was needing faster than industry norm paths to: visibility and recognition, near instant ultra premium respect and trust, audience adoption without trial, ambitious year over year growing sales targets
Business Control: To become a healthy established winery by year 5 so as to be able to shift from startup development/implementation phase to on-strategy operation/refinement phase
Establishing Kelly Mason’s relentless approach to viticulture and vineyard processes as part of Mason Vineyard’s demonstrated definition of obsessive quality in winemaking.
Our Strategic Approach
Solutions:
Strong Foundation: Create a strategy and brand that would support the new top tier artisanal winery and its ultra-premium Canadian wine, and which would have the strength, trust and visibility of a successful 10th year brand almost right out of the gate
Be ‘truly’ well defined: Design a brand with a well defined compelling story from which to project a clear message, strong personality rich voice, well defined purpose with deftly aligned visual design and imagery so as to not waste time and energy clarifying and repeating weak or confusing messages
Business focused Brand: Present a magnetic brand which audiences could quickly relate to, adopt and become themselves ambassadors of
The Scope of Work.
Insite created a scarcity positioned, ultra-premium and high tactile gift wine set that could appeal to top collectors as well as supportive corporate buyers.
Insite’s Goals were achieved:
Anticipated and Planned: Developed and implemented strategy and process towards overcoming anticipated startup challenges
Strategic Releasing: Created strategy and implemented process for wine release launches with the goal met of selling out majority of wines within the first 60 days of release period
True Customer Management: Created strategy and implemented process for building an effectively segmented client allocation email database, from which majority of release volume was purchased
Considerate Customer Clienteling: Created strategy and process for a precise, on brand, repeatable, bare minimum communication and marketing system customized to 3 tiers of client relationships which facilitated successful sell-outs and consistent growth in the top most engaged tier as well constant increase in average spends
Lean Strategic Communication: Created a strategic on brand social media system that conserved resources by being strategically subject and message focused resulting in gaining 3k highly engaged and sales supportive social media followers who consistently purchased remaining cases available after initial email list allocation
Sales targets as solutions: Surpassed year over year increasing case sales goals, allowing introduction of special release projects beyond initial case volume targets
Sell-through as a brand strategy: Created strategy and implemented process for selling out each vintage before next release thereby avoiding aging inventory burden; storage costs, future labour and future marketing costs associated with marketing the same wine multiple times
What We Built
In an interview, Kelly Mason and Thomas Bachelder discussing their Mason Collab release among topics of the Niagara terroir identity and the Canadian wine industry.
Summary of achievements:
(inside our 3 year contract period)
Aimed High: Delivered strategy and brand that positioned winery as among best in class, helped attract national acclaim, gained passionate loyal following and built a reliable customer base that allowed the business to grow with confidence
Built Loyal Reliable Audience: Created strategy and process that lead to a healthy loyal repeating client list plus 3k social audience supporting 3 consecutive complete vintage sell-outs
Reached: Multiple highly regarded wine review coverage (both traditional and digital)
Resonated: Best in class exposure with multiple National traditional media / magazine articles
So there you have it. That’s what we do behind the scenes and that’s what a successful strategy and brand build is about. If your business or brand can use strategic thinking, design, systems and execution, reach out.
FAQ
Common Questions
Who built the Mason Vineyard brand?
Insite, a brand strategy and design company based in Burlington, Ontario, built the Mason Vineyard brand from pre-startup in 2021. The relationship spanned 4 years and included the the pre-launch strategy and build, the communication and release platform and then content creation and management.
What services did Insite provide for Mason?
Insite led brand strategy and positioning, naming, visual identity, label design across the two product ranges, specialty packaging, product portfolio strategy, hospitality experience consulting and brand story and messaging architecture.
How did Mason Vineyard become so quickly established within Canada's wine scene?
Mason became so quickly established and successful because it was designed for speed of growth from the beginning. Every decision was to strategized to leverage the charisma, reputation and skills of the founder and winemaker as well as the beautiful terroir. No energy was wasted in the the effort to gain traction in the market, build audience and sell out wines.
What made Mason different from other Canadian wineries?
Strategy is the difference. Starting with the strategic choice to not follow what other wineries typically do when building their wine companies as well as creating their wine portfolios. The business and brand were interwoven — a purpose built winery and brand designed to produce beautiful wine, allow access to that wine and winemaker, with the focus to sell through all wine each season in the most efficient way to limit resources and allow the winemaer complete attention on doing what they do best. And to communicate this bullish approach with confidence and sophistication. This is truly unique.
What is Insite's expertise with alcohol beverage startups?
Insite has been working with founders and their startups since 1993 so they are deeply rooted within the startup culture and way of thinking. The agency specializes in alcohol as well as premium food and beverage and has helped many dozens of brands get off the ground with many having had enormous success. Insite is particularly experienced at defining new categories and uniquely differentiated propositions for the brands it creates.
Can Insite help a new winery build its brand from scratch?
Yes. Insite has helped start dozens of wineries from ultra small lot ultra premium to larger more mainstream offerings. Because of their deep category experience and understanding of wine combined with small agile size, they are uniquely positioned to work with startup founders intensely hands-on, tackling all areas of needs from start of conception through to launch and post launch activities.
Related Work
More from our Mason partnership
CTA
Building a brand that needs to own its category?
If you're building a winery, spirit, premium food, or lifestyle brand and you need a strategic partner and a design studio that think together.