Seasonal campaign and art direction
A wine importer with no retail presence and no advertising budget, given a campaign that ran entirely on the one surface they already owned: the bottle.
Cellar Nine imports small-production wine to 200 Copenhagen restaurants. They have no shops, no shelf, no media budget and no interest in becoming a consumer brand. What they have is a hand on every bottle that reaches a restaurant table. We built a campaign that lived there and nowhere else.
01 — The problem
Cellar Nine's growers were the reason restaurants bought from them, and the reason was invisible. Sommeliers knew. Diners did not. When a restaurant dropped a grower, nothing in the room noticed.
A conventional brand campaign was both unaffordable and wrong — it would have addressed people who cannot buy from Cellar Nine at all.
02 — The thinking
The campaign occupies the only surface Cellar Nine controls at the moment of drinking: a numbered neck tag on every bottle. Nine weeks, nine growers, one tag per week, each printed in a two-ink pairing built from the grower's own vineyard soil colour.
Because the tags are numbered and sequential, they became collectable without anyone being asked to collect them. Restaurants started pinning the run behind the bar.
03 — The making
Tags are letterpressed on 600gsm cotton board — heavy enough to sit in an ice bucket for an hour and come out readable. We proofed on press with the printer rather than on screen; three of the nine pairings changed at the proof stage because the overlap went muddy on damp stock.
Each tag carries the grower's name at a size usually reserved for the producer, and Cellar Nine's own mark at the size usually given to a distributor. That inversion is the entire campaign strategy expressed as a type hierarchy.
04 — The result
Eleven restaurants asked for the full set of nine to display. Cellar Nine has run the format every season since, which is the outcome a campaign should aim for — not a spike, but a habit.
Behind the decisions
Long enough for a regular diner to notice a second tag; short enough that the restaurant never had to store more than one box.
Cellar Nine cannot sell to a diner. Spending on reach that could not convert would have been a vanity campaign with a report attached.
Three soil pairings overprinted to near-black on damp board. We re-sampled lighter seconds rather than switch to coated stock, which would have killed the tactile point.
Selected artefacts
Outcome
9
Each given the largest type on the bottle.
200
Zero media spend outside print.
4 seasons
Re-commissioned every season since launch.
“We asked for a campaign and they gave us a format. We are still using it three years later, which nobody warned us was possible.”
Credits
Campaign strategy
Nadia Brandt
Art direction
Júlia Ferreira
Print production
Petra Lindqvist
Services used
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