Urban Legend Cellars

  • Research
  • Strategic Positioning
  • Storytelling
  • Branding
  • Package Design

The story.

Urban Legend is the anti-snooty winery based in Oakland, California. We helped reposition them with an inclusive tagline, clean, approachable designs, and a fun, somewhat fact-based urban legend and food pairings on the back of each bottle.

The rebrand: The Urban Legend story.

The challenge was to reposition a small Oakland winery from a local boutique winery into one with broad, national appeal while giving the current name, Urban Legend, meaning. After interviewing existing customers, wine buyers, and the winemakers themselves, we came up with an overhaul strategy for Urban Legend, resulting in a complete new package design and a new tagline, “It’s all about you.” The unique design and copy concept represents the winemaker’s bold stance on breaking the mold with panache as well as caring more about what they—and you—think about the wine they create rather than what the critics say. Each wine has a legend printed on the bottle’s back that tells the wine’s story and a bit about the winemaker or the winemaking process for that particular wine.

The rebrand of the premium line.

Urban Legend previously had a high-end line of wines under the brand name “There.” We encouraged them to fold that line into the Urban Legend brand and create a unique look with the metallic script U to help differentiate these higher-priced wines from their main line. This gave Urban Legend the strength of an unfractured brand (critical for a company of its size) while allowing it to have a premium brand line extension.

Since the rebrand, we're seeing 20% growth, year over year, in total sales.