Eight Degrees Brewing
The mission
The craft beer industry in Ireland has exploded over the last decade and 8 Degrees is one of the stars of the scene. When they originally came to Neworld, they were entering into a new period of rapid growth and ready to expand their market share. Their brand’s positioning is really the true essence of their personality: ‘Naturally Adventurous.” They were ready to kick it up a gear and they needed true collaborators that would elevate their voices, their creativity and their ideas.
The question
How do you help a brand stand out from the chaos of the craft beer shelf?
8 Degrees already had a core range of beers and wanted to do some further development on those. They also had strong concepts for their yearly collectable beer labels series, which they wanted to explore with us. With both the evergreen beer range and the special edition campaigns, each label needed to tell a complete and compelling story.
All of the designs needed to win the craft beer attention war, but it was also vital to get the idea of the collectable campaigns onto the special edition packaging. The collectability of each series was a major selling point. The plan was to drive engagement both online on social media and in-store: customers would try to collect all the cans in the range, making sure they’d tried them all.
The process
Truly effective craft beer packaging isn’t just about being eye-catching. You also need to get across the creative edge of the product itself. What’s the most succinct way to communicate that message of what you’re trying to achieve? Sometimes, it’s as much a process of subtraction as addition. Without stifling creativity, we needed to refine and edit the visual language.
Once we were fully immersed into the brand’s ethos, we began a collaborative with the 8 Degrees team. With their input and feedback, we created a final design system which we applied to packaging, merchandise, social media content and the 8 Degrees website.
The transformation
The first collectable campaign we worked on was ‘Rack Em Up’, for Eight Degrees’ eighth anniversary. They produced eight exciting and innovative beers in collaboration with the world’s best craft breweries and other leading local producers. The campaign was based on Eight-ball pool, with each collaboration represented by a different colour ball.
The next campaign collectable range we worked on was the ‘Munroe Series’. This one focused on the “Naturally Adventurous’ brand positioning by exploring Ireland’s highest mountains, the Munroes. This mountain range towers over the 8 Degrees brewery in North Cork, and our design concept celebrated each of its eight peaks.
