Northern Landings

Boutique gin distilleries seem to be flavour du jour in Canada, with more and more specialty spirit creators joining the fray. It’s part of a wider trend of spirit producers adding local flavours to traditional gin botanicals to create new and unique products.

When distillers Northern Landings approached us, they knew they wanted to produce high-end gin in Canada, but they needed a brand identity – a story and personality that communicated the warmth of Canadian hospitality and the ruggedness of the great outdoors. Northern Landings was a blank canvas. For us, that meant creating an identity from scratch, setting out a position from which the rest of the project would be informed. Choosing a brand archetype helped us establish and flesh out that identity, giving us characteristics that guided our branding design choices.

We identified the brand as explorers with these attributes:

Northern Landings’ audience was well-off, experience-oriented young adults between 25 and 35. They tend to prioritise spending on experiences with friends and family over purchasing material goods. It needed to distinguish Northern Landings from the homogenous slew of boutique gins in a way that clearly displayed their brand personality.

The idea of coming home from a great adventure mirrored the Northern Landings story – the founders had gone off on their overseas experience, and were returning back home to Canada to start a new journey. It had a warmth to it that felt evocative and genuine – and we explored expressly Canadian imagery that embodied the story of coming home.