Empowering a social enterprise to position themselves more professionally – boosting their appeal and creating opportunities

Ivybridge Brewing Co. is a local social enterprise creating award-winning beers in bottles and on draft in their lively tap room. This deeply personal venture started at the heart of a family. Simon Rundle became aware of the limited employment opportunities available for people with learning disabilities, including his daughter, Nia. “It’s something like 5.1% of people with learning difficulties have some sort of paid or meaningful employment, which is really low. I’m trying to make a bit of a difference.”

So he established the brewery to give opportunities to people like Nia – starting with four members of staff. They now have 15 people involved in various roles, many with learning difficulties and mental health issues.

Having received funding to help them grow their capacity, they needed to progress their brand to give it a credible mainstream appeal whilst telling their heartwarming story.

What Upshot did

Strategic thinking

The strategy was simple: to communicate Ivybridge Brewing Co.’s mission to make a difference through high-quality beer. Previous labels and communications had struggled to find the right words, and most people would have missed the joyful heartbeat of the business if they hadn’t searched for the information. The brand idea was based on the concept of ‘Great Beer Changing Lives,’ which became the anchor for the whole brand. This gave Simon and his team a clear proposition that could appear on all their materials and start important conversations.

We had some simple objectives to achieve through the brand identity and packaging. It needed to retain an element of familiarity in order to help the team remain engaged and not be bypassed. It needed an element of colour or design to make it easy for them to recognise and process each bottle at a glance. And it needed to clearly reference the story and compel customers to find out more.

Visual identity

We wanted to show how Ivybridge overcomes the gap that people living with learning difficulties must somehow navigate to gain access to the world of work. The solution of an ‘I’ gave us a three-fold win: the Ivybridge initial became a graphic symbol; it gave us a large area of colour to differentiate products; and it created the chasm across which the logo could be positioned – an apt metaphor for bridging the divide.

We allocated each beer a bright colour to contrast against a black background (or white for guest or seasonal brews), giving clear product differentiation. Typography was carefully considered, using Inconstant – a font designed with deliberate inconsistencies to help people with dyslexia recognise and read different letters clearly. And the ‘Great Beer Changing Lives’ moto became a graphic motif – complete with a symbol combining a hop and a series of star-shaped sparkles.

Website design

Simplicity was key for the website, and Squarespace offered the most straightforward platform to help Simon and his team gain an online presence. The website needed to tell the brand story, advertise the great beers, give credibility and serve as a perfect location to direct enquiries – all of which the new site is able to do beautifully.

View the Ivybridge Brewing Co. website here.

“We really valued Upshot’s personalised approach to our rebranding exercise. The way that Owen and his team engaged with us at an early stage to find out our core values and purpose meant that we felt that we were in safe hands when it came to the process of putting together our new brand design.”

Simon Rundle, Founder, Ivybridge Brewing Co.

Impact

As Ivybridge Brewing Company goes from strength to strength, our brand refresh has given them a firm foundation to build on. The new look and feel takes Simon’s personal vision and reimagines it, bringing it to life in a professional, compelling way. It helps this community-minded business to appeal to new customers and its beers to compete amongst those from more established producers.

This in turn supports the business’s essential mission – to give more people living with learning difficulties the opportunity to gain skills, confidence and independence through employment.

“The more beer we sell, the more money we make, and the more opportunities we can offer,” said Simon who has continued to invest and throw himself into the brewery. Their busy tap room is moving to an adjacent larger unit in central Ivybridge, and they have won numerous awards for their beers.

“Great Beer Changing Lives’ has become a very powerful proposition that we use when describing our beers and the ethos of the brewery to customers. The fact that this is up front on our labels and merchandise, rather than our story being hidden away, is a major positive outcome from our rebrand. We would definitely recommend considering a rebrand as it can have multiple benefits that extend beyond just the ‘look’ of the product,” says Simon.

Mount Wise House, 1 Discovery Road, Mount Wise, Plymouth PL1 4QU