About Voice
WE DIDN’T CHOOSE THE DRINKS INDUSTRY
The Drinks Industry Chose Us.
WE CREATE BRANDS FOR DRINKS.
Big, bold, beautiful, strong, effective, award-winning, premium brands. Our drinks own the shelves on which they sit.
But it wasn’t always this way. Rewind to 1999. We’d just opened Voice’s doors and, as two raw and very green newbies, we had a lot to learn.
We were smart enough to always hold a huge reverence for drinks branding. We were a little intimidated by it, to be frank. It is, after all, one of toughest sectors to crack a product into.
We knew this wasn’t an area for fresh grads. It was for serious design thinkers who inhabited the drinks world, inhaled drinks-related work and who knew the industry—its players, its regulations, its nuances, its challenges—like the back of their thumb.
We were acutely aware of the stakes, too. In an over-saturated, hugely competitive market, drinks branding works time-and-a-half. An eye scans a loaded shelf in a nanosecond. In that time, the design must tell a story, build a connection, ignite trust and establish a market leader.
Truly brilliant drinks branding—we’re talking the best of the best of the best—levels up even further. It satisfies a maker’s need to talk while also inspiring a consumer to not just listen, but care and remember. It’s so evocative and memorable that it can be recalled even when the name fails you.
So, yes, while we would have loved a crack at doing drinks back then, we knew we didn’t have the runs on the board for it. It was a big gig for the big wigs. We didn’t have the stripes.
But in our first year of business, we rebranded a pretty major coffee company and realised packaging instincts were springing out of us like water from a leaky tap. We were green, yes. Would we do things differently now? Well, of course. But we did a bloody fine job and the fire was lit.
Then we landed our first wine client, Beresford Wines. Then Step Rd Wines. Then Hardy’s. By the time Longview came along in 2008, we were confidently backing ourselves and leading the charge. We were no longer brief-followers, we were serious drinks design thinkers.
We were no longer brief-followers, we were serious drinks design thinkers.
Longview cleaned up. Within three years they grew from one to eight export markets and expanded sales in these markets by 800 percent—and swept a ton of design awards along the way. We knew we had earned our stripes.
And so, it seemed, did the drinks industry. Hither & Yon. d’Arenberg. Hugh Hamilton. Angove. Sevenhill. Corryton Burge. Houghton. Maxwell. Hill-Smith Family. Accolade. Pernod Ricard. The wine clients kept coming. The awards kept growing. Then the spirits clients. St Agnes Distillery. Threefold Distilling. The McLaren Vale Distillery. More clients. More awards (152 AGDAs, to be precise).
25 years later, here we are. Bona fide drinks branding and design specialists, residing smack bang in Adelaide, one of the great drinks regions in the world. 600 SKUs under our belts.
We’ve worked with everyone from conglomerates to founders to multigenerational family businesses.
Tons of experience bringing clarity and cohesion to complicated portfolios. A talented team working alongside us, who have worked with some of the largest and greatest global drinks brands in the world.
We can say, without a shadow of a doubt, we have white-hot sector awareness. We’re up-to-date with technology and across the regulations and competitors. We’re all over the best supply chain—the who, the where, the how—and know how to make visions in packaging come to life.
When we say we didn’t choose the drinks industry—that rather, the drinks industry chose us—we mean it. We’re here because we had a knack, that turned into juggernaut of drinks clients, that turned into a deep love and searing passion for this industry. But that doesn’t mean we’re not absolutely thrilled to be here.
Thanks for choosing us.