Good Pair Days - A brand Case Study

The next phase of our wine adventure.

We originally launched as The Wine Gallery.
Our name wasn’t living up to the mission and the future we wanted to create. It was too literal, too generic, too noisy on social media. It didn’t reflect our fun and inclusive spirit.

On top of that our brand felt inconsistent, pieced together and un-ownable. It needed to up its game — be playful, but serious when it came to quality wine. The Wine Gallery had served us well when we were a small start up, but we needed something to help us create the future of wine retail we had imagined.

We approached Sydney based design firm, Universal Favourite, to help us give the brand we were building - the look and feel we thought it deserved.

Pairing with the perfect identity

Step one - the new name on which everything would be based. Universal Favourite brought in the big guns with the supremely talented writer Cat Wall to workshop a new name. We needed something surprisingly delightful. Something exciting and inviting. A name that truly reflected  our mission to invite everyone to explore and enjoy wine. A name like Good Pair Days.

What's a Good Pair Day?

A good pair day means you’re feeling yourself. Everything is going your way. Things are matching up perfectly. You're feeling content with top notes of excitement. The kinda days that can be enjoyed solo, with your favourite guilty Netflix indulgence paired with a red of course. Or paired up with your bestie for a dance party in the kitchen, cooking up a storm. The perfect pair of shoes for an outdoor venture that winds up somewhere cute. The always happy to share a rosé at a baby shower friend. The person you want to impress with a home-cooked special something. Pairing you to wine. Pairing wine to food. Good Pair Days

Next came the look and feel!

The brand overhaul came next. Focused on that Good Pair Days feeling, Universal Favourite developed a comprehensive identity system that worked seamlessly across both physical and digital. They created a logomark, illustration system, supporting icons, ownable colour palette, bold typefaces and tone of voice that would speak to winesquad across the brand across campaigns, website, app, packaging and sweet member swag.

Giving a digital company a human touch

Our visual identity needed to effectively represent the brand’s digital nature without losing the human touch of our exceptional customer service and product experience. Universal Favourite, lead by the talented Senior Designer Meghan Armstrong, created a series of diverse and energetic illustrated characters to guide the customer through the online and offline experience.

Wined, sealed, delivered

Much like the brand, we wanted the unboxing experience to be unexpectedly and utterly delightful. From a single-bottle box to a 12-bottle case, the entire packaging suite is littered with quirky, bold brand messaging. Universal Favourite helped us to redesign the tasting note cards, welcome booklets and tote bags to make the discovery and education experience even more exciting for our audience.
We also used the rebrand as an opportunity to do something very close to our heart; to go greener, by finding an innovative way to remove single-use plastic and tissue paper from our packaging. By designing a built-in handle and an insert made from biodegradable moulded pulp, we were able to make the product packaging 100% recyclable. After all… no planet, no pinot.

Reimagining the online wine retail experience

Being a digital-first company, creating an amazing online experience is essential. We wanted the member section of the website to guide the user through a Netflix-style experience to explore, rate and discover wines from around the world.

Built mobile-first to reflect the digital consumption habits of the audience, we wanted a seamless customer and wine education experience, regardless of device.

Universal Favourites introduced a My Box tray, accessible from any screen, so users can see and configure their upcoming box and are always aware of what they’re getting and what they’re being charged. We asked them to design a wine exploration experience that broke up our wines into digestible collections, with the aim of simplifying the decision-making process. They added a simple UI touch — differentiating bottles and grape types with white, red, rose or sparkling colour highlights — to provide our wine lovers with an easily identifiable indicator.

We also wanted to double down on the ability for our customers to learn as much or as little as they wanted during their wine journey through adding a Taste Test Challenge which lets everyone walk through each bottle they receive and test their taste buds on the wine's key characteristics. Not in a pretentious way, but rather, in a way that lets you go 'wow, I'm starting to really be able to pick out the acidity in my bottles!'

Alongside the website, we asked Universal Favourite to translate our online experience in our first app and create an even easier interactive experience from your phone.

Next step, how would we get the word out?

We were proud of what the team had created, and wanted a campaign that would communicate not only how fun and engaging we wanted our brand to be, but also demonstrate our biggest point of difference to any other wine service - Our mix of expert curation with technology.  
We gave the UF team and writer extraordinaire Cat Wall one key constraint - if you can replace our name with any other wine company in any of the ads then it wouldn't work. We wanted to showcase how differentiated our customer offering is. They didn't disappoint! They created the “It’s like if…” campaign and built a suite of outdoor ads and a collection of cute digital animations that not only launched the new brand into the world but showcased each of the new brand assets we’d worked on.

A vibrant visual suite of friends, wine and good times

We teamed up with the world-famous photographer Benito Martin (Sam I Am) and stylist Jessica Johnson, to put together both a product and lifestyle shoot that encapsulated the Good Pair Days experience — friends, wine, good times. This gave us a visually dynamic suite of images that could be used across web, communications, social and advertising in the year following the launch.

Our mission is to open up the world of wine discovery to everyone — from newbies to aficionados — in a joyful and inclusive way. The Universal Favourite lead team took this mission to heart to help us bring to life our bold, full-bodied rebrand with top notes of excitement. We’re grateful to for everyone that made this next stage in the Good Pair Day's journey possible.