asha and Danae Goldsmith had a mission: "To create a cider for those who 'don't like cider' and obviously for those who already do."
Sasha was born into the hospitality industry and created Cellar d'Or just over 10 years ago. He and wife, Danae, have grown that business into three e-commerce sites, cellardor.com.au, winecave.com.au and huntforwine.com.au. Danae is a psychologist with an eye for design trends.
"Endless Cider was created after a trip to the UK in 2012. We enjoyed drinking cider and ginger beer and started thinking about developing a real cider for the Australian market," Sasha explained.
"Coming from the wine industry with a love of Champagne, we developed Endless Cider with the help of a sparkling maker from Gippsland. It was important to use traditional artisan techniques with only real crushed fruit from Victoria's Gippsland region, to also support local growers. Instead of beer yeast, we opted for Champagne yeast, and we feel what has been created is a pure fruit-driven style that finishes gorgeously clean. There are no concentrates, artificial flavours, sweeteners or colouring and is vegan friendly and gluten free. Cider with a heart and cider made with love!"
The Goldsmith's original thinking doesn't stop with their 'seriously fab cider for the not so serious.' The husband and wife team created its seriously standout packaging too.
PKN asked them about that.
PKN: Where did the packaging design idea for Endless Cider come from?
Sasha Goldsmith: Danae and I have been involved in the wine industry for many years and have always been interested in label art and packaging. Most of the designs we had come across seemed to continue around the bottle horizontally. There was something about the idea of the coloured stripes that we loved. And they worked well with the packaging. We believe that the name, Endless, is strong, as it can precede anything, and the striped design reinforced the word.
PKN: How did you develop the idea?
SG: Danae is the creative eye, and I'm the graphic designer so to speak. We noticed that when a bottle is poured you lose the ability to read the label if it is horizontal. So we rotated the label to vertical. As a bonus the stripes became endless. When horizontal, they have defined limits. So, when you tip the bottle to pour, or drink, you read the brand. The stripes add a lot of texture to the label, which was also very important to us. Our brand motto is, "The pleasure of life can be endless with the right perspective. We can find happiness everywhere if we look at every situation as a new opportunity. The possibilities are Endless."
PKN: When you do something outside the square, there are always challenges. What did you conquer?
SG: There were issues with having too many colours, the neck wrap of the cider bottle wrapping incorrectly, and too much happening on the label to even consider adding the desired textural elements.
The quotes we received were so incredibly inhibitive it seemed as though the label makers really didn't want the job. Our only option was to do it offshore. We held the meetings and did press check over Skype. When we received the first run of labels we realised how we had envisaged the labels was going to be difficult to translate. The first run didn't look too bad - in fact to others the labels looked great, but it still wasn't how we wanted them to look.
The brand name, Endless, was initially embossed and this lessened the clarity of the name. The stripes were too close together, and the colours just weren't bright enough. When we were ready for our next run, the company we were using was unable to do another run for us due to new export laws. So we were handed over to its Australian sister company. We were pleasantly surprised. Australian Company, Collotype, gave us reasonable pricing and took meticulous care to bring our vision to life. They were also able to iron out all our little glitches. Danae flew to Adelaide for press check. Andrew Mather and the Collotype team were brilliant. And we were set.
For our outer boxes we used Visy. We had no idea of the limitations of flexo-printing so had to change the design many times. We basically learnt on our feet about box design and how many mistakes an amateur can make, but we finally got there after a few early morning drives to Dandenong.
