Domaine Lafrance

A third generation apple orchard turned distillery, crafting exceptional quality spirits since 2010

Building a summer launch campaign for the new line of spirits

Background

Domaine Lafrance are a third generation distillery, apple orchard, vineyard and sugar shack located in Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, Quebec.

They’ve been working the land since 1925 and with 3 generations of expertise, they are a family business that has survived the test of time. Eric Lafrance, the grandson of the founder, now runs the Domaine. It’s no exaggeration to say that these guys understand distilling craftsmanship better than almost anyone else.

Our work for Domaine Lafrance began in the winter of 2018.

Coming fresh off a great success with our event for Expo Entrepreneurs, we were contacted by Domaine Lafrance to come help bring to market their new flagship products of the distillery: the Dandy Gin and the Rouge Gorge Vermouths.

We were immediately interested by the challenge and began preparing our plan of action to get people interested.

Luckily for us, we had a competitive advantage.

We knew the products were great: not just good
but some of the best spirits on the market today.

The campaign for
Dandy Gin

The first step of marketing any product is to do your research.

We immediately got to work by tasting all of their products, which led to less than productive brainstorming as you might imagine. After sobering up, we outlined a couple of possibilities for the campaign.

After proper research on the target demographic, we concluded that we couldn’t go with a classic serious ad for Dandy Gin: the product itself was tongue in cheek in its presentation.

We decided to create a twist on a classic ad campaign

Instead of regular cocktail making-of videos, we hired a great local comedian named Alex Bisaillon and had him cause chaos as mixologist Etienne Bay attempted to show him how to properly make a cocktail. Improvisation and a genuinely fun team dynamic made for unmistakably fun content.

Campaign for
Rouge Gorge

Unique Vermouth from the heartland of Quebec

For Rouge Gorge, we took a slightly different approach. We wanted to create a campaign that would arouse curiosity, without showing too much to the audience.

With little time to get our campaign running, we built out a script and storyboard overnight. We built out our vision: quirky, curious, but appealing and friendly.