Drinks design agency Stranger & Stranger wants to shake up how wine brands are presenting themselves - and is offering its services for free to a company prepared to innovate.


Founder and creative director Kevin Shaw is ready to stump up, depending on the brief, up to £30,000 worth of design per month, for any firm ready to do something different. “Just don’t ask me for a Blossom Hill rip off,” is how he puts it on his blog.

“What I’m interested in is bringing young drinkers into wine with different wine products, addressing occasion rather than provenance, really pushing the green issue instead of paying lame lip service, really communicating with consumers instead of seeing them as an occupational hazard, inspiring and fun ideas, new formats, anything that isn’t on the shelves already,” said Shaw.


He announced the move at the Consumer Forum last week, jointly hosted by Harpers and website Wine Option. Full coverage will be published in Harpers December 16 edition.

“The only way I can tell what year it is in the UK wine trade is by looking at the vintage on the bottles,” blogged Shaw.

“It’s just not good enough. We can do better than this and, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m again calling for more innovation in wine and I’ll put my money where my mouth is. We’ll brand up, for FREE, one job a month, as long as it’s an interesting wine product. That’s right, a normally very expensive, high kudos Stranger & Stranger brand job for FREE as long as it isn’t a bland product.”



Depending on the brief we could be talking about 30k so it’s a fair prize especially when you consider the extra PR this will generate.