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Hired Guns
Hired Guns Creative's owners Leif Miltenberger and Richard Hatter.
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Stoutnik
Competition for visibility on a West Coast craft beer shelf is fierce. For Stoutnik, differentiation is achieved through stylish, sparse, contemporary design, a frosted black bottle, and printing techniques not usually seen on craft beer labels. And for the true explorer, the story told in blind-embossed Morse Code seals the deal.
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Bonamici Cellars Label
The branding and packaging design for Bonamici Cellars emphasizes a journey to a new place, something undiscovered, where anything is possible, anything achievable, as long as you have a good friend along the way.
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Hired Guns
Hired Guns Creative's owners Leif Miltenberger and Richard Hatter.
First impressions count. Especially when it comes to labels on wine and other alcoholic beverages. Your product must stand out and deliver the right impression to attract the consumer.
Fortunately, there is a firm that takes the tried and true theories of design and creates new, exciting work with them by incorporating solid, fundamental approaches without the modern-day fluff and nonsense.
Award winning Hired Guns Creative, which specializes in the wine, beer and spirits market, focuses solely on getting the right kind of attention to increase consumer interest in your product.
“There are a lot of labels that look great on the bottle,” said Leif Miltenberger, a partner at Hired Guns. “But when you put them on the shelf next to other bottles, those same designs blend right in – they don’t have the impact you’d hoped for.”
Recognizing the wine industry, which is so dependent upon appearance, could use a fresh approach, Miltenberger and business partner Richard Hatter, help beverage clients cut to the core of their brand. The imagery and messaging they create is a pure translation of that brand essence.
“We aren’t confined by what’s been done in the past,” Hatter noted. “We look at what the winery is all about and what their wine is all about. We work as a team with our clients to get all the thoughts out on the table, then we sift through that information to find the nugget to extract and nurture into a compelling brand story.”
Not confined to just label design, Hired Guns provides a range of services that bring attention to your brand: winery and product naming, branding, and marketing strategy – which frequently lead to web design, marketing materials, and various collateral.
Creativity is often about finding new answers to old questions and for Miltenberger and Hatter this means different processes than the average design firm.
“We go further down the rabbit hole than most,” said Hatter. “We bring a younger, fresher perspective to things and yes, we may have a slightly weirder perspective, but that gives our clients their desired outcome.”
One project that recently gained such an outcome is a new Okanagan winery, Bonamici Cellars. They received rave reviews for the label on their recently launched wine.
Author and wine columnist, John Schreiner said, “I want to compliment Hired Guns Creative on the Bonamici Cellars label. It is so refreshing that I smiled spontaneously in joy when I saw it. It has been a while since I have seen such an effective label.”
Hired Guns takes on a project wholeheartedly – it isn’t a watered down, rehashed approach; this is a customized methodology tailored to the needs, personality, goals, and preferences of each client.
Since they are a small boutique firm, Hired Guns is hands-on and produces higher quality work due to the energy poured into understanding a winery’s needs at the foundational level. The profound concentration of creativity that Hatter and Miltenberger bring to the table, and their belief that every project is unique, helps them approach each project in a specialized manner.
This has created a track record of positive results, including the win they earned in the Applied Arts 2013 Design Awards for their Stoutnik beer label, plus another international packaging design award they’re required to keep under wraps until it’s formally announced later this year.
“We don’t want to be the typical design firm and we don’t go through a typical process,” Miltenberger noted. “We want to give you something you couldn’t come up with on your own, but that suits your brand and the market perfectly. Then, when we hear a client say they can’t make enough wine to keep it on the shelf, we know we did our job right.”
When it’s time to make your wine or beverage stand out on the shelves, consider asking Hired Guns Creative to release their creativity. You are certain to see your products pour out a great first impression.