Playful label designs for artisan cider 'upset the apple cart'

A dynamic and charming new brand identity for U.K. artisan cider and juice producer Orchard Pig is allowing the company to scale up its core business and move into the mainstream. Brand design specialist Blue Marlin created the new look, which encompasses 16 products in glass bottles rolled out in on-premise and retail locations in early March.

According to Blue Marlin, it has worked with Orchard Pig for five years, since the company launched as a niche brand. Now that it has grown into a bona fide brand, Blue Marlin says, Orchard Pig needed a new look to “vault it into the big time” while reinforcing its credibility as a top-quality producer with an expanding portfolio of authentic products.

“Orchard Pig is a real colorful character and quite simply one of a kind. To reinforce this, the new [bottle] labels have been designed to make Orchard Pig stand out from the herd by celebrating its hero, provenance, and natural individuality,” says Orchard Pig managing director Andrew Quinlan. “Playful copy, unconventional color, graphic discovery, and a bit of mischief have been combined to appeal to our free-spirited fans and their thirst to explore.

“What the redesign has done is create a herd, Orchard Pig’s family if you like, while at the same time has provided much clearer product differentiation between ciders and fruit juices, and specifically the individual varieties within these categories, to make the range easier for consumers to navigate.”

Blue Marlin gave each product a fun and memorable name. For the farm-pressed Somerset ciders, led by bestseller Reveller, the new names reflect Orchard Pig’s character: a loveable swine. And for the juice range—Totally Minted, Very Berried, and Deeply Rooted—they offer a playful way of communicating the invigorating flavors, and make a splash about the new trio of unconventional sparklers.