Bear Flag Wines was my first foray into product and brand development. Gallo was looking to create a more accessible wine brand for a younger generation, so my creative partner and I were paired their two youngest winemakers to create two new blends and a brand from scratch. No money, no idea what we were doing, but it also meant we weren’t tied to any conventional thinking around wine culture. We snubbed label traditions for a bright, artistic collab with trippy artist Eduardo Bertone, used screw tops (fairly radical at the time, now standard), and played with what was then cutting edge tech like QR codes to unlock label animations. Our DIY sales team launched purely through events and earned media, showing up in places where at the time you just didn’t see wine brands; tastings at chop shops, sewing socials, punk shows and adult petting zoos. We eventually launched an additional two blends and within two years we were in over 30 markets in the US.