What it is:
Smith & Forge was a new hard cider brand with great packaging and a bold attitude — but no retail creative and zero activation materials at launch.

Why it mattered:
The brand needed to win over young men who saw cider as too soft. We dug into its real heritage: cider was once the drink of 19th-century workers, ironmongers, and frontier types. That was our entry point.

What I did:
Led the creation of a full visual world rooted in industrial Americana — steel, anvils, tankards, hammers — and layered it with character-driven retail storytelling. We built everything: iconic glassware, bold point-of-sale, illustrative iconography, and a full cast of tongue-in-cheek, engraved-style characters that nodded to the past with a wink.

What happened:
Transformed a blank-slate launch into a rich, ownable retail presence that made Smith & Forge feel like a brand with history — not a new entry chasing trends.