Having broached the topic of wine marketing just a couple of days ago, I’m obliged to point out that Hugh and Stormhoek have offered £1000.00 to any blogger who provides them with a convincing design for their bottle and label. They want their wine to stand out among wine bottles as Apple computers do among a sea of generic PCs. I offer a muted “Bravo” — as you might expect, given what I said earlier. (By the way, they aren’t looking for a full-blown presnetation treatment; as Hugh says, “An idea that works on the back of a cocktail napkin is just fine by me.”)
It’ll be easy to tear off a flashy shape or label; as a buyer, though, I’d be attending particularly to what the design communicates about the wine. (Wine bottles, after all, have drawn near perfection in packaging: optimal packing density, strongly-defined conventions relative to shape and color, and so on). I would commend a clear glass bottle, to help set it apart from the green and brown bottles on the shelf (since part of Stormhoek’s pitch is its freshness, one need not worry as much about the effects that light might have on the wine). The shape of the bottle probably can’t depart too much from present norms without incurring too great an expense in tooling and shipping. Hmmmmm.
I suggest Pippa submit a design!