Folkhouse Craft Brewery
Branding Case Study // Folkhouse Craft Brewery is a brewing community built on the foundation of collaboration by encouraging the local community to come together and learn about, make and enjoy quality craft beers.
Situation & Opportunity
In our third year at the Wilson School of Design, we were given a semester-long project to research and develop a design for Folkhouse Craft Brewery. Because of the co-op business situation of the brewery, we were given a business plan to use as a reference when creating the creative brief.
In this project, we were assigned to build a visual identity to represent the brewery and the messaging to send out to the sponsors and clients. We were also tasked to create a story to describe a beer collection, design labels, beer carrier and illustrations.
Research & Strategy
In my study for this project, I had to analyze the condensed craft brewery market in Vancouver. Through this, I was able to get exciting information on the culture of craft brewers and breweries. This proved to be useful in terms of target market. Furthermore, we looked into the variety of beers and different ingredients, these key insights helped significantly with the marketing and design aspect of this project.
With the large market of craft breweries located in Vancouver, I noticed that there are varying levels of the playfulness of branding and marketing. There was complete freedom to express the Folkhouse brand. Therefore, I decided to base the design of the consumer habits and behaviours and to refer to crazy stories and explosive illustrations for the packaging of the beer series.
Solution & Outcomes
The inspiration of the design revolved around the idea that people typically go out at night to go ‘hunt’ for beer. I made this comparison to a fox, as they are as well nocturnal animals who hunt during the night. Therefore, the newfound visual identity for Folkhouse Craft Brewery is that of a fox, and the tagline “Night falls, Beer Rises” came from the resolution that when the night falls, we pour our beers and raise our glasses.
The labels design correlates to the fox hunt for rabbits or bunnies. The theme of the beer revolves around these bunnies and their cannibalism. The theme resulted in a hand-illustrated drawing of the events of the bunnies eating each other. Moreover, the beer carrier design needed to mimic the same illustration style. I decided to handwrite in a sketchy manner to tie in the labels. This created print that went that is used on sides, and an inverse inside. The front has the name of the series and the back has the Folkhouse brand and tagline.
Resolution
Overall, creating the Folkhouse brand and packaging was the most fun project I have taken on. It is rare for project to have this much freedom in terms of design, and I had to take on full advantage. This project was an opportunity to develop my marketing skills which, resulted in creating a very rationalized design. If there was more time allotted to this project, I would have liked to expand some of the marketing materials, such as ad campaigns, website and videos advertisements.