THE REAL WINE CO.
Brand Strategy & Identity System
Transforming a 17-year-old independent wine retailer through strategic repositioning and a modern visual identity.
OVERVIEW
The Real Wine Company is an independent wine retailer specialising in wines from small, carefully selected producers. Founded over seventeen years ago, the company had grown organically but had never undergone a formal brand refresh.
The project focused on repositioning the brand within the contemporary independent wine landscape while creating a cohesive system able to scale across digital, marketing and e-commerce touchpoints.
THE CHALLENGE
The existing identity had remained largely unchanged for over a decade, resulting in visual inconsistency and limited differentiation in an increasingly competitive market.
Rather than a simple visual refresh, the project required a strategic realignment — clarifying the brand’s positioning and translating it into a distinctive, scalable visual system.
MY ROLE
—
Independent senior Brand Designer
(2024)
• Led brand discovery, stakeholder interviews and competitive research
• Developed three strategic creative directions and guided final design selection
• Designed the full visual identity system and brand guidelines
• Created scalable marketing and campaign frameworks for social and email
• Designed seasonal campaign assets across digital and print
• Collaborated with developers to implement the website design within CMS constraints
1. DISCOVERY
To define the right direction, I began with a brand discovery phase, conducting a structured interview with the founders to understand:
the origins of the business
their long-term ambitions
how customers currently perceived the brand
and where they wanted the brand to evolve.
These conversations helped uncover the core strength of the business — a curated selection of wines from small independent producers — and clarified the tone the brand should communicate moving forward.
2. MARKET ANALYSIS
To ground the design direction in the contemporary wine landscape, I conducted a visual benchmark across independent wine retailers operating in a similar space.
The analysis explored how these brands communicate through typography, colour, photography and e-commerce design, identifying common patterns as well as opportunities for differentiation.
This research informed the strategic direction of the identity and helped ensure the brand would feel contemporary while remaining distinctive within its category.
3. STRATEGIC DESIGN EXPLORATION
Based on the discovery and market analysis, I developed three distinct creative territories exploring different ways the brand could evolve — from artisanal discovery to refined cellar elegance and a more intimate family-led approach. Each direction explored typography, colour, imagery and logo design to help the founders visualise the potential positioning of the brand.
4. BRAND IDENTITY
Following the concept exploration phase, the selected direction was developed into a complete visual identity designed to reposition The Real Wine Company as a modern independent wine retailer.
The previous identity relied on bright colours and illustrative elements that no longer reflected the maturity of the business or the quality of its curated wines. The new identity introduces a confident typographic logo and a more restrained visual language, allowing the brand to feel contemporary while remaining warm and approachable.
The system combines a refined serif typeface with a natural, earthy colour palette inspired by vineyard landscapes and wine tones. Expressive graphic elements and organic shapes introduce character and movement, while a structured typographic hierarchy ensures clarity across digital and marketing communications.
Together, these elements form a cohesive brand system designed to support the company’s growth while maintaining the authenticity and independence at the heart of the business.
4. BRAND APPLICATIONs & MARKETING SYSTEMS
To ensure the identity could be used consistently by a small internal team, the brand was translated into a structured set of marketing and digital templates designed to support day-to-day communication.
A series of flexible frameworks were developed for social media, email and website promotions, enabling the team to create content while maintaining a coherent visual language. These included thirty-nine evergreen social media templates, four modular email layouts, and a suite of promotional formats for both the website and marketing channels.
Alongside these marketing systems, I developed the UI direction for the company’s new website, collaborating closely with developers to translate the design mock-ups into a functional CMS environment. Layouts and components were refined throughout the build process to ensure the final implementation remained aligned with the brand system while accommodating technical constraints.
Together, these elements transformed the identity from a static design into a practical toolkit, allowing the brand to communicate consistently across digital and physical touchpoints while giving the internal team the flexibility to manage content independently.
