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 and see familiar successful wine labels, delicious beer cans, progressive retail interiors, and loads of design work and solely creating visible identities and packages is what we do for many clients — 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 project. And I say unique because our solutions are always bespoke, tailored to suit each client's needs and challenges.

Project Case Overview

Client: Mason Vineyard

Scope: 3yr Contract / Strategy, brand and business development

Duration: 2021 through 2024

Challenges:

Startup winery needing to fast track the typical startup winery slow growth cycle
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
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

Solutions:

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
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
Present a magnetic brand which audiences could quickly relate to, adopt and become themselves ambassadors of

Insite’s Goals were achieved:

Developed and implemented strategy and process towards overcoming anticipated startup challenges
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
Created strategy and implemented process for building an effectively segmented client allocation email database, from which majority of release volume was purchased
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
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
Surpassed year over year increasing case sales goals, allowing introduction of special release projects beyond initial case volume targets
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

Summary of achievements

(inside our 3 year contract period)

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
Created strategy and process that lead to a healthy loyal repeating client list plus 3k social audience supporting 3 consecutive complete vintage sell-outs
Multiple highly regarded wine review coverage (both traditional and digital)
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.

Cheers