Gold added to the colours of Dicey
Changing the name of the winery brand from Ceres to Dicey after 16 years of hard graft felt counter-intuitive. The challenge and cost of taking something completely new to market felt like it could be a step backwards. That name meant a lot to the Dicey family. Ceres in South Africa is where both Matt & James were born. There are deep, wine farming family roots in that part of the world and the name felt authentic. Authentic. It’s an interesting word and it’s what every marketing pro tells you you need to be. However, as Ceres wines didn’t really find their place in the market it became evident that the name meant less to others as the brand struggled to get traction despite sincere and best efforts.
It took two years of navel gazing, many hours of strategy meetings with the team at Tradecraft, a change of national distributor to Red+White Cellar, prompting from close friends and family, some deep-diving around values and goals, a lot of sensitivity and some serious courage to discard the underperforming brand and all those years of work to start again.
Once that bridge had been crossed and the word-mark of Dicey was decided on, the job at hand was to find a design partner who could see past the category and truly see the lads for who they are. Tradecraft facilitated pitches from a number of fantastic New Zealand designers of which, Inhouse was a leading contender and eventually won the work — and could fit it in given the high demand for their services.
Arch and Toby of Inhouse came down to the vineyard. They had to see the place, feel the place and meet the brothers to get this right. Their first impression was that Bannockburn and Central Otago was very brown. Brown became the foundation of the first few brand iterations but in James’ inimitable style, he protested bluntly, “Central Otago is not brown!”
It’s true that in the moment that team Inhouse touched down, the season and that particular day did portray a range of browns. Tussock covered peaks rolled into muddy winter water. But one of the wonderful things about Central Otago is it can be changeable and unpredictable.
Snow-fed rivers run through it. Hillsides turn mauve with wild thyme. Leaves drop from trees brightly burnt orange by the autumnal shift. The sky is dazzling blue or thunderous grey depending on the day and the lichen that line the rocky outcrops range from pastel yellow to peppermint green. It is a myriad of colours that strike against the hardest of landscapes. How beautiful. How important to share.
To convey these aspects of the environment with Inhouse, James asked his partner Odelle, an artist, to create a colour swatch of the colours she saw on the land. Colours that someone who lives here in all the seasons would know and see.
Odelle’s painted colour swatch of Bannockburn
The final concept from Inhouse and the award-winning label.
Inhouse provided a number of iterations of how they saw this working for the brand using Odelle’s colour swatch and the strategy work that Matt and James had done with Tradecraft. It’s testament to both the designers and the Diceys that through thorough discussion and sharp instincts this final die-cut, colourful, outrageously satisfying label was decided upon.
On Friday 18th February, the NZ Institute of Design Best Awards 2021 winners where announced.
Inhouse won a gold pin for Dicey.co.nz/graphic/packaging/inhouse/dicey/ in the packaging category and a silver pin for Dicey in the colour category. How’s that for authentic?
Dicey:
Unpredictable and potentially dangerous
An apt description of wine-making on this land.
Dicey:
Two brothers
Two neighbours.
Two forces in harmony and opposition.
Inhouse | Dicey for packaging
Inhouse | Dicey for colour
Judge’s comments —
So sophisticated and elegant. Unique and premium colour usage on display for a category that is really hard to be unique in. We loved how the label didn’t follow traditional codes of the wine category.
Thanks to Arch, Toby & Jane at Inhouse for picking up what Matt & James were putting down and making it look so dang hot.