From Icons to Innovators: Inniskillin's Contemporary Wine Renaissance Rebrand
Scope
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Brand Identity
Brand Collateral
Packaging
Brand Video
Brand Guidelines
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Founded in 1975 by Karl Kaiser and Donald Ziraldo, Inniskillin is Canada’s original estate winery and industry pioneer.
Jacknife was tasked with refreshing the brand to appeal to younger wine enthusiasts and shift its perception to a more premium, modern, and recognizable offering.
Established in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the name is derived from the famous Irish regiment, the “Inniskilling Fusiliers,” and is rooted in a history of “making the impossible possible.” The now-iconic brand had accomplished the unthinkable, bringing Canada to the top of the wine world and was now ready to tell its rich story with the swagger it deserved.
Leveraging their newly developed brand positioning, “Makers of the Impossible,” we looked for creative ways to communicate the notion of taking every experience to the next level and enjoying it with those you care most about. The new branding needed to make it easy for our target audience to choose Inniskillin as a brand they could be proud to share with friends and family.
As a Canadian household name, Inniskillin’s iconic emblem held equity and needed to be carefully considered from the start, which meant rigorous design exploration and development to compare a wide selection of potential concepts. Ultimately, we modernized and simplified the mark through subtle tweaks and detail refinement, intentionally making it the brand’s contemporary hero while remaining connected to its original essence.
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Our team then underwent an extensive packaging hierarchy/architecture exercise to rethink Inniskillin’s collection of world-renowned, award-winning VQA table wines and icewine (including six tiers and multiple sub-tiers). Experimenting with bold colour palettes and premium finishes, we pushed traditional conventions within the category, ultimately differentiating the tiers from each other—and the competition. We also created copywriting for each label as a discoverable element to help tell the story of the progressive, artisanal winemakers behind the product.
As the portfolio was rolled out across Canada, Jacknife was busy rethinking the Inniskillin estate and retail experiences, bringing the brand promise to life and creating a must-stop destination in the Niagara region.
Always what I needed, never what I expected. For Inniskillin’s packaging update, Jacknife’s label designs helped premiumize the bottle in line with its contents, giving it a modern appeal and standing out on-shelf in a busy wine category. Beyond the art, their technical knowledge of print production was relied on regularly, and their friendly account management always made for a good laugh.
