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The Project

Post earthquake, The University of Canterbury Club were struggling, they couldn’t operate from their base at the Ilam Homestead, contributing to membership and revenue losses.

We were brought onboard to create a roadmap that grew revenues and helped to restore the club, as well as it’s financial position.

With that in mind, we identified multiple revenue streams, one of which was creating authentic boutique festivals that fit in well with the homesteads values. These events could not only celebrate the craft and excellence of NZ based producers but fill in the quieter periods in the clubs calendar.

The Gindulgence Festival was created to celebrate New Zealand’s craft gin, bringing together the best craft gin producers from all over the country to showcase their products and the New Zealand craft gin industry.

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The Process

Our task was to create the brand from scratch, from creating a name that resonated with our audiences, to creating a visual identity that portrayed the artisan craft of producing fine, small-batch New Zealand gin with an elegant but exciting festival vibe.

We then needed to ensure this could be applied to all festival collateral, including the website, programmes, site maps and social media assets.

Our point of departure was to create a sophisticated icon device, inspired by the botanicals used when making New Zealand Craft Gin (Juniper, Manuka, Kawakawa and Horopito), along with fern imagery giving a distinctly New Zealand feel.

An organic hand-rendered illustrative style was deployed representing the ‘artisan craft’ nature of small-batch gin distilling. Movement in the typographic treatment was combined with a limited colour palette to give a fun and energetic festival vibe that ‘spoke’ of the audience experience.

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The Outcome

Launching a new event in a busy consumer market is never an easy task, however the Christchurch Gindulgence Festival was a resounding success, selling out within weeks of advertising ticket sales on social media.

From here, Gindulgence has continued to grow year on year, extending the Christchurch festival to be a two day event, as well as launching the festival in Wellington over another two days and Auckland – more than quadrupling the size of the festival in two years. Tickets are a hot commodity across New Zealand, with each event regularly selling out well in advance.

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