2023 Muse Awards
Gold Award
Copalli Website
Website – Food & Beverage
Copalli Rum is a company with a purpose. They are committed to their ecosystem, offering the people of Punta Gorda Belize rewarding and meaningful employment that celebrates its unique biodiversity, and renders rainforest deforestation for cultivation and unsustainable fishing unnecessary. The company supports Hillside Health Care International, an NGO which brings free health care to Southern Belize, and Claver College Extension Program, an adult education program which aims to provide quality education to citizens of Toledo who need a second chance to finish their high school education. And they are a member of their Conservation Circle, which supports and protects endangered species, threatened rainforests, and other tropical ecosystems around the world
And they make some darn tasty rum.
Using personas and UX, we designed the site to highlight all the levels of their amazing brand story, while not losing focus on the product. With content developed for both conscious consumers and flavor explorers, we wrote all the copy and the positioning tagline “Doing Good Tastes Delicious”.
Credits
COPAL TREE DISTILLERY LTD
Brian Baker
WINEGLASS MARKETING
President: Susan DeMatei
Strategic Lead: Gaynor Strachan Chun
Group Creative Director: Andrea Marke
Design Supervisor: Patrick Hurley
Account Executive: Alani Flores Carillo
Silver Award
New Frontier Wine Co Launch
Corporate Identity – Brand Identity
New Frontier Wine Company was formed to house the wine brands of Alejandro Bulgheroni, an International Vintner, Humanitarian, and Conservationist. Our objectives were to create a cohesive and consistent umbrella (parent) brand, from positioning to personality, look and feel, and everything in between.
The core positioning took its lead from the umbrella brand name: a modern expression of the pioneer spirit, with the branding leaning heavily on recognizable icons and symbols of a frontier/western lifestyle – cowboy hat logo and strong, earthy colors, masculine but not too male. The brands housed under the NFW umbrella brand allowed for a wine-centered strategic pillar: the democratization of luxury wine, expressed as “New Frontier Wine Company allows everyone to enjoy a great wine regardless of price.
This strategic pillar guided our design principles for the New Frontier Wine Co. tasting room design. Napa tasting rooms tend to be either very traditional in feel or very modern and minimalist. They don’t immediately communicate, “Come in, relax, be comfortable, stay as long as you’d like; all are welcome. Our inspiration for the tasting room was a comfortable living room. The personality was expressed as follows:
- Comfortable: All are welcome. Relaxed atmosphere.
- Authentic: Natural materials and true to the brand persona. Natural materials extended to merchandise selections and designs.
- Maverick: A reinvention of the traditional tasting room in line with today’s more casual culture.
- Masculine: But not overtly male
- Conversational: Individual pods of furniture create the feeling of having your own space. Tasting room staff instructed to be storytellers, not presenters.
“Disobedience is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress is made.” – Oscar Wilde
Credits
NEW FRONTIER
General Manager: James Silver
WINEGLASS MARKETING
President: Susan DeMatei
Strategic Lead: Gaynor Strachan Chun
Group Creative Director: Andrea Marke
Account Director: Nathan Chambers
Account Exectutive: Brittany Monk
Account Executive: Alani Flores Carillo
Silver Award
Resistance Wine Email Marketing
Branded Content – Email Marketing
Resistance Wine Company focuses on small, sustainably-farmed vineyards and small-batch, minimally invasive wines personally tended throughout the vinification process. They resist industrial-scale winemaking and wines and encourage their followers to resist ceremony, pretension, over-inflated winemaker egos, reviewer scores, and high prices. In doing so, they are instilling permission to simply enjoy their wine.
Being a virtual wine brand is difficult because consumers don’t have a chance to visit and taste the wine. Also, small wine brands don’t gain the attention of prominent distributors meaning consumers won’t find the wine in their local store, either. The only option is to convince people to buy the wine directly without trial. To gain attention and cut through online clutter, this campaign pokes fun at the typical glossy wine ad and stuffy tradition surrounding wine. We use sketches of the wine bottles instead of beautiful photography to match the “protest sign” cartoon of the logo. The copy is very rebellious with a wink of fun. We are currently working on transforming and streamlining the website.
Credits
RESISTANCE WINE CO
Owner: Kirk Drake
WINEGLASS MARKETING
President: Susan DeMatei
Strategic Lead: Gaynor Strachan Chun
Creative Director: Eduardo Lago
Account Supervisor: Leslie Mullowney
Assistant Designer: Tony Fung He
Silver Award
WineGlass Marketing 2022 Wine Industry Benchmark Report
Branded Content – White Paper
The internet is full of benchmarks and studies about email marketing, but very little exists about wine-related content. Can we assume we are analogous to a “Retail” category? Agricultural? Food and beverage? We’re never sure.
So, we started a project in January 2018 that entailed recording every email we sent for our clients. The first year we tracked 3,089,124 emails across 1,697 campaigns for 43 clients over 21 months. We removed administrative and club emails, checked for statistical significance, and can confirm this is a large enough sample to be confident about the findings. Our goal was to compare our clients’ results to the posted industry benchmarks to see if they were a good
judge of success.
What we uncovered was interesting. And became a “thing” in our little industry. We now publish this annually for free. Here is the 2022 report.
Credits
WINEGLASS MARKETING
President: Susan DeMatei
Analytics Supervisor: Zach Zuniga
Assistant Designer: Tony Fung He
2023 Muse Awards
The MUSE Awards is made up of a series of competitions organized to honor excellence in various fields and industries. Judging was done by a jury panel which was composed of industry professionals. Thanks to their efforts, IAA was successful in upholding impartiality and implementing industry-relevant assessment criteria. The jury was tasked with identifying companies or individuals whose works exemplified excellence and that had pushed their respective industries forward.
The awards received jury nominations from 17 countries and ended up with 60 jurors. These professionals are held in high regard in their respective industries and are tied to renowned organizations in the creative and design industries. On top of having industry-relevant standards in the judging process, impartiality was further enforced by using the blind judging method. Effectively, each entry was evaluated by multiple judges without being compared to other submissions. In this scenario, every work could only win based on their own merits.