What’s with the bikes, dude?
Designing a new brand from a clean sheet of paper is a pretty formidable task. Name, logo, colors, target market, tone, copy, artwork, product differentiation, all sprinkled with a militant attention to detail. The list is anxiety provoking when taken in its totality, but for our team we’ve been lucky to grow brands that have sprouted pretty organically.
That started with Sociable. We (Founders Jim and Wade) were spending the week with friends at Dry Fly Distilling out in Spokane, Washington. The week was the culmination of a month-long “research” road trip through the county’s breweries, distilleries and cideries. It was a trip to formulate our business plan and refine the guest experience we planned to create. One afternoon we snuck out for a bike ride. A couple miles into it I broke a spoke on my rear wheel. The resulting rub was so bad it turned the ride into a long walk. On the stroll back to the distillery we determined that “broken spoke” would be a great product name. That got us into a rhythm of spitballing other bike related names. A brand theme started to materialize.
By the time we got back to the hotel that evening we had a half of dozen solid product names ironed out, one of which, “Freewheeler” turned into our company’s flagship product. By that time in our planning process we knew we were going to approach cider making a little differently. We planned an intersection of two unique perspectives: wine making and brewing. An intersection that merged artistic and technical, agricultural and industrial, rural and urban. We needed a brand name that captured that duality and tied together this bike theme we had birthed.
Through sheer dumb luck we stumbled upon the Sociable: a two-seat bicycle design that was popular at the turn of the century. Coincidentally, a time that coincided with the heyday of cider consumption in North America. The Sociable bike was a two-wheeled bicycle where, unlike the in-line seating of the tandem bicycle, riders sit side-by-side. All the better for…socializing. We loved it. It was a strange and memorable image, it tied our bike theme together, it captured the duality of our brand, and it captured the essence of a business born of friendship. It was the perfect brand for ciders we reckoned would be “best shared with a friend.”
We ran into a mountain of hurdles getting Sociable open, but some things seemed to fall into place effortlessly. It was almost like we encountered certain roadblocks precisely so that they could reroute us onto a better path. When we found “Sociable,” it felt like that. The perfect culmination of our plans. It fit almost TOO well. I don’t know if I believe in fate, but by golly it makes the hair on my arm stand up thinking about how things lined up as we started to flesh out our plans for the brand.
Sometime shortly after we opened the Sociable taproom (I can’t remember exactly when) Wade’s mom was cleaning some stuff out of the attic of his grandmother’s house. One of those long forgotten, dusty mementos was an old apple crate with a faded brand name painted on the side. The brand name: “Jim Wade Apples.” Fate indeed. You can see a replica of that crate hanging from the ceiling of the NE Minneapolis taproom.
