Meet the experts:
Richard Hatter, creative director,
Hired Guns Creative
•• Lifelong artist, classically trained illus-trator
and professional graphic designer
for 20 years.
•• Co-founder of the specialized agency
that does branding, design and market-ing
for breweries, distilleries
and wineries.
•• Creative mastermind behind more than
250 labels, including award-winning
packaging for Driftwood Brewing,
Bonamici Cellars, Coven Vodka,
Stoutnik and others.
Mari-Lou Nidle, principal, InHouse
Media + Marketing Inc.
•• Thirty-year career in marketing with pre-vious
roles as CMO and marketing direc-tor
of large corporations.
•• Owner of full-service beverage mar-keting
agency that caters to small and
medium-sized wineries, distilleries and
breweries as well as white labelling for
larger companies.
•• Special focus on business strategy and
integrating the brand into the labelling,
social media, sampling and
web development.
James Falloon, creative director,
Anouk & I Design & Illustration Studio
•• Former art director with large
creative agencies.
•• Serves clients in Canada and Belgium
with design and illustration, creative
direction in food and alcohol beverage
packaging, festival creative, branding
and marketing.
•• Designed wine labels for Sumac Ridge,
Peller Estates and larger white-label
brands, custom NBA cans for Coors and
a new Miller beer for the India market,
label and label updates for whiskies.
How does the process to design a label/
package typically begin?
Although every project has a customized
path, the starting point is a discovery pro-cess
to understand the ask from the cli-ent.
Is it a rebranding exercise? A com-plete
start-up that requires a name for
the product(s)? Is it labels/packaging for a
new product in an existing line-up? Once
the scope of the project is in place, the
discovery will shift to the client and its
target demographic.
“First, I try and figure out the tone
of the people behind the product and the
kind of product they’re making, i.e. lager,
IPA, etc.,” said Hatter. “Then I work on the
people they’re selling to – are they a blue-collar
guy who gets off work and wants to
drink a six-pack before he goes to bed, or
are they a person who wants to talk about
hops at a party?”
Nidle focuses on creating a strategy
that’s in line with the company’s goals. “A
lot of times people will call us to do labels
and social media, and we bring them back
to strategy first. Unless they already have
a strong brand and are just renewing or
refreshing labels, we step back to under-standing
the brand and the strategy.”
Falloon also employs a discovery phase
to establish a design strategy. “The creative
team will try to syphon as much informa-tion
from the client as possible about them-selves,
their intentions and the product’s
characteristics and market. The team will
also do their own research before starting
on ideation.”
What goes into a good name?
Hatter is the mind behind a lot of beer
names, and he says it’s more challeng-ing
than one may think. “Naming is really
hard because the market is so saturated at
Courtesy of Sean Fenzl
Courtesy of Anouk & I
PACKAGING
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