Lake Louie Brewing turned to charm to go toe-to-toe with beer giants to win Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Brewing Company (who also owns Lake Louie Brewing) approached SixSpeed with grand ambitions to win Wisconsin by appealing to a younger audience. As far as beer goes, you might as well try to win Germany.
Never those to shy away from grand ambitions, we accepted the challenge through a
three-phased approach:
Redo Wisconsin Brewing Company’s brand architecture.
Reimagine the brand strategy to unite two brands in that ambitious goal.
Give every inch of the identity a facelift.
Young craft beer drinkers in the Madison area.
They’re adventurous souls craving a carefree experience, community connection, an emotional story — and of course — darn good beer.
Wisconsin Brewing Company owned Lake Louie Brewing. Together, they had a handful of popular local beers but no brand cohesion.
Through a myriad of interviews with key stakeholders, SixSpeed determined that Wisconsin Brewing Company would become the parent company of the contract brewing side, and Lake Louie Brewing would emerge (stark naked) as the face of the B2C business.
There’s a reason for the bold and bare brazenness. Lake Louie’s roots lie on the other side of a pile of clothes at the end of a dock.
Lake Louie grew from the reputation of a legendary pond where local youths would go to skinny dip. As many of us know: Nude plunges are the hallmark of a carefree youth. And Lake Louie’s founder took a naked plunge when he purged his retirement account to quit his engineering job to pursue his real dream of starting a brewery.
By shedding Wisconsin Brewing Company’s old clothes in favor of something more… memorable — SixSpeed collaborated with the client to come up with the following framework to organize the new brand’s actions.
Armed with a fresh perspective and new purpose,
we set out to remake the face of the brand.
There were only two rules. The first was to keep the lure. The second was to embody the spirit of the new brand story.
So, we leveraged a powerful insight of the sought-after 24-36 year old market.
Old enough to know better.
Young enough to do it anyway.
Embodying the spirit of skinny dipping, we transformed a dated logo into an illustrated lure built off a beer stein to embody the strategic principle of Lakeside Levity.
The colors were updated to add vibrancy and youthful energy.
And it filtered down through the packaging. Each beer can gain cohesion, while retaining a unique identity through patterning and language that brought two different lines of beers together.
A new beer was even designed using this system to show flexibility and scale.
The new identity is stocked on shelves in the greater Wisconsin area (and at a branded stadium branch for a local baseball team).
Press has been mounting. For the first time in 5 years, both brands existed with purpose and renewed passion built around some seriously tasty brews.
In the end it turns out it’s better to shed your skivvies than wear clothes that don’t fit.
"When we needed a refreshed brand strategy and visual identity, we turned to SixSpeed. I’m happy to say they exceeded our already high expectations. They quickly assembled a world-class team to work with us and they immediately rolled-up their sleeves and dove into our brand, business and competitive set. They asked all the right questions, and more importantly they listened and fostered a fantastic team approach to the project. In the end we have a crystal clear brand strategy and a visual identity that is truly breakthrough. We loved it so much we had SixSpeed develop our new packaging and we couldn’t be happier. Simply put, SixSpeed is loaded with talent, loaded with great people who are a pleasure to work with and loaded with passion and good ideas."
Paul Verdu
President, Wisconsin Brewing Company, former VP, MolsonCoors
See related press coverage: Wisconsin State Journal, The Verona Press, and OnMilwaukee.
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