Rowena Curlewis says that design drives sales.
Of course, she would say that — Denomination, the drinks branding company she co-founded with Margaret Nolan, has offices in Sydney, London, San Francisco and New York.
But she has the sales results to prove it. “I’ve seen so many results, all around the world, when clients change their label,” she says.
The three design pillars
Desirability
Denomination, one of the most-awarded drinks design agencies in the world, says effective design does three things: it makes the wine desirable and distinctive, and it conveys drinkability.
But creating good branding begins with understanding the user. “One of the key things we look at is what their values and beliefs are,” says Curlewis. “We believe that if there is a connection between what I believe as a brand and what I believe as a consumer, and you get those two together, this wonderful attraction happens”.
Take the Australian brand Tread Softly. Created five years ago, the lower alcohol wine features a minimal label, but a capsule that’s a riot of flowers. It’s a wine created to appeal to people who care about sustainability; a native tree is planted for every six bottles sold.
“When the brand’s belief is aligned to our belief, we feel connected and subsequently the brand becomes a marker of our identity as a person,” Curlewis explains.
Distinctiveness
For the second pillar, distinctiveness, Curlewis draws on the work of Professor Byron Sharp.
Sharp is the Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, whose 2011 book, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, became an instant marketing classic. Based on evidence-based research, it overturned received wisdom about how to market to people. For example, he discovered that there was very little evidence to suggest that consumers actually wanted a “relationship” with a brand.
Instead, the data suggests that the best branding makes the decision to buy easy; it’s attractive and memorable in a way that makes it easy to like, memorise and recall. This is what he called ‘distinctiveness’.
“You can have a logo, you can have an icon, you can have a colour, but you have to be ruthless and say are they really distinctive, or are they actually the same as what my competitors have?” says Curlewis.
Once the brand elements are in place, Curlewis says they have to be used consistently, across every element of communication. “That’s critical.”
Penfolds, for example, is nothing if not consistent. “This is a brand I’ve worked on for nearly 30 years,” she says. “Over the years and decades we’ve built up these distinctive brand assets.”
Every bottle and every gift package uses the colour red. “We try and own the colour.” Other elements include a unique logo and a proprietary bottle.
Drinkability
Finally, the product’s branding must signal that the liquid inside is drinkable. “We use something called the MAYA Principle,” she says.
Created by industrial designer Raymond Loewy, “MAYA” stands for “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”. Its core idea is that consumers are drawn to products that feel familiar, but which have a twist of novelty.
“You have to make sure there’s enough there for them to trust and feel comfortable, but also enough to get them excited and intrigued,” says Curlewis. “What you’re trying to do is develop some codes they can understand. It’s bringing the product to life.”
She gives the example of Uovo, created by Cherubino Wines in Australia. “It’s a beautiful premium wine, made 100% in concrete eggs and aged in those eggs as well,” she said. “There’s a real purity to the wine as a result.”
Denomination created an egg-shaped label, and put the bottle into an egg-style carton. “For me, this is the three Ds coming together — desirable, distinctive, drinkable.”
Bigger sales
But is there any proof that great design leads to better sales? Curlewis says yes.
“Tread Softly has a very beautiful label, but tiny branding. The branding is about 10 point in size,” she says. “The reason is because we want consumers to lean into the brand. Any kind of normal client would have said to put the flowers on the front and make the branding three times as big. Our client took a leap of faith.”
Not only have they sold enough wine to plant two million trees, but it’s sold in eight different markets, and has “expanded from table wine to sparkling to spritzers, and also into spirits as well.”
Curlewis runs through other successes: Four Winds saw a 47.5% increase in sales revenue and a 246% increase in wholesale listings 18 months after its re-brand. Pepperjack’s 2019 brand refresh resulted in a 20% increase in sales, in both volume and value.
“Harnessing the power of branding will lead to commercial success,” Curlewis adds. “Think about the thought, desirable and distinctive brands that capture consumers’ hearts and minds, but also their memory structures as well.”
How an Outsider Used Design to Build a Wine Brand
A German entrepreneur focused on user-friendly design.
Eliah Werner doesn’t have to be convinced about the power of branding. “Brands give people guidance. Brands give people trust,” he said.
He also thinks there’s a good reason why consumers keep complaining that the wine category is too complicated. Back in the days when he was just a wine consumer, he would also stand in front of a wine shelf feeling baffled. One day, he decided to change that.
Cutting through the noise
Werner grew up in a household where both food and design were important. His father was a kitchen designer at Miele, while his mother taught home economics and cooking. Later, during a road trip through the US, he became inspired by the cool young winemakers he came across. But back home in Germany, he found himself “bored and confused” by the wine labels.
So in 2019 he launched his own label, young poets, as a side gig. Today it’s sold more than 250,000 bottles and has expanded to other European countries, at a time when the wine market is shrinking.
In his role as Brand Director at Procter & Gamble, he said he learned it’s important to understand how people use the product. “I spent several weeks in Russia and Turkey watching mums changing diapers,” he said. “You see and feel how consumers are using your product. Does it make sense how they rip it up? How is it when they pull out the diaper and put it on the baby? Do we have the right stripes on it?”
In his opinion, this kind of user testing is missing in the wine sector. “When I talk to winemakers, they always try to put the best into the wine glass,” he says. “But if you don’t go through the entire journey of catch, connect, close and continue, most people will never, ever taste your wine.”
Werner said he spent several weeks watching people shopping and stopping and talking to them. He discovered that wine consumers first look at the wine colour, and then at the grape. So he decided his priority was to give them an easy way to find the grape name, so that shoppers can understand what the grape is at five metres. He removed the vowels from the variety and printed it in big letters and now it’s easy to see at a distance. “On the back labels, we have three simple words explaining the wine: fruity, creamy and bold.”
Werner is also aware of the paradox of choice, where having too many options becomes paralysing. “So we only have one Riesling, one Sauvignon Blanc. We want to keep it simple.”
He also does market research and works to build an online community around the wine. “There’s something called the IKEA effect: if you invest more time into something, you love it more.”
Finally, he says it’s a mistake to believe that if the product is made more appealing to young people, that it will lose its older, established audience. “Marketing and communication that works for younger audiences also works for older ones,but not the other way around.”
This article is based on the presentations given by Rowena Curlewis and Eliah Werner at the Meininger’s 2025 Conference, held the day before ProWein in Düsseldorf.
