Wine · Brand world
Sailer
— wines you remember by character, not grape
The challenge
Sailer is a small Austrian winery — the kind where you taste the wines, meet the people who make them, and take a bottle home. These labels were never built to fight for attention on a supermarket shelf. They had a different job: make the wines personal and hard to forget for people standing right there at the winery.
The names and personalities already existed. My job was to give them a face.
The face
Don't illustrate the wine. Illustrate the character behind it.
Red John became a confident rooster. Green Mary, a playful hen who's in on the joke. Rose Anne — a goose dreaming of being a flamingo, pink swim ring and all, her whole personality hiding in one small prop.
The labels stay deliberately quiet around them: clean type, plenty of white space, simple layouts. Everything steps back so the character can step forward.
What stayed,
what changed
Stayed — across the range
The restraint. White space, clean typography, one character per bottle, the same calm layout across all three.
Changed — every bottle
The animal, and the personality it carries. A different mood on every label.
One quiet family, three distinct personalities — connected on the shelf, but never interchangeable.
The world
So visitors don't choose between three near-identical labels. They meet three characters. On a small family winery's table, that's the whole point — the wine stops being a grape variety and starts being someone you remember.
The result
Three bottles, produced and pouring. That is the whole range: a small family winery in Haugsdorf, not a brand fighting for shelf space.
The winery took the trio further than the labels. Green Mary, RedJohn and RoseAnne are now sold as a twelve-bottle set of their own, and the birds turn up in the winery's own copy — a wild goose here, a cheeky rooster there. The cast stopped being packaging and became a product.
Want one of these
for your own range?
Tell me what you're making and what comes after it. I'll tell you which chapter it is — and if it isn't a fit, I'll say so.