What you actually decide when you create a private champagne brand

One of my clients specified the shade of a particular colour he wanted for his packaging and his label. Not just the colour. The actual shade.

He was right to. There were historical references built into his design, and that shade carried one of them. If we’d come back a little off, the design would still have looked handsome but one important part of the story would have been missing.

I mention it because of what most people assume when they first ask me about creating their own private champagne brand. They assume it’s just a purchase. An expensive one, made once, after which some bottles arrive with their name on them. It’s much more than that; it’s a long series of decisions, and they go a very long way down.

How far down they go

The name’s the first one, and I’ll come back to it, because it’s the one that can stop everything.

Then the bottle itself, which isn’t one decision but dozens. The cork, and the plaque that sits on top of it. The wire cage. The foil. The label. The box, if there’s a box. Every one of those has options, and every option either says something about the brand or says nothing at all.

Then, if the client wants to go that far, where the champagne comes from. There are twenty-odd sub-regions within the overall appellation of Champagne, and a client can choose among them. Most people are surprised to hear that, because they assume the wine’s the part that gets handed to them and the label’s the part they get to play with. It’s the other way round more often than they expect.

The client I mentioned wanted total control over every aspect of the appearance and, where possible, over the sourcing as well. His requirements were very specific and very particular, and they were all absolutely central to the success and the authenticity of what he was building. That’s a client who knows what the thing is for.

The name, and the thing that can stop you

He came to me about a year ago from a country with real, verifiable historical connections to the Champagne region, wanting to link his brand to a specific episode in that country’s history. The name he had in mind is double-barrelled, and it represents two families who were historically present here. Its connections go back three centuries.

When he told me, I knew he’d done his research. It struck me straight away that this was a serious enquiry, the fruit of a lot of work, and something he was seriously committed to.

Which is also why we had to check the name before anything else happened. It’s not automatic that a name a client comes up with will be approved by the authorities in Champagne. Brand names are registered here, and registration can be refused.

In his case I think refusal’s very unlikely, because the names the authorities prefer are patronymic. Family names. Usually a Christian name and a surname, though two surnames is also very common, and his is two surnames. Similarity to an existing brand doesn’t worry me much either. There are already many instances of very similar family names in use, with a slightly different Christian name, or a slightly different first or second part of a double-barrelled name. And if his exact name turned out to be taken, we could reverse the order of the two. I’m confident that would go through.

But I’ll tell you what I told him : if the entire success of the project rests on that name being approved, it’s potentially a gamble, it’s that or nothing, really.

The conversation before any of it

Whoever the client is, and whatever they’re hoping the brand will do, we start in the same place. We talk about the objectives for the brand: the marketing story and the brand identity, and we look at whether they’re strong enough to suggest the project will actually succeed in meeting the objectives. 

That conversation’s where you find out whether there’s a brand here or just a nice idea.

Two kinds of owner

People sometimes ask me which is better. The client who’s in this for the authorship, or the client who’s in it for the money.

I’d turn the question around. What does the authorship-first client get that the money-first client doesn’t?

The money-first client’s likely to end up with a larger business. Greater sales, greater profit, because that’s his sole purpose and his sole focus. The client who puts authorship first will get more satisfaction and more personal reward, and probably sales on a slightly smaller scale. But since that was never his main priority, that’s perfectly acceptable.

Profit’s a perfectly legitimate target in its own right. I’m not going to tell you it produces a worse business, because it doesn’t. It produces a bigger one. What it doesn’t produce is the other thing.

You can see both in public if you want a reference point. Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac, better known as Ace of Spades, has been a commercial success on a large scale, and the marketing’s been about extravagance and high price and volume. Moët Hennessy, the wine and spirits division of LVMH, took a fifty per cent stake in it in 2021. Brad Pitt went the other way. He worked with the Péters family in Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, well known in Champagne but not large, and produced twenty thousand bottles of Fleur de Miraval in its first edition. Both bottles are expensive. Only one of them’s trying to be everywhere.

In my experience the people more likely to want authenticity are the people who’ve already succeeded. They’ve nothing left to prove, because they’ve already got to the top in their career or their field. What they’re after is something more satisfying and more personal. It doesn’t have to be on a large scale, or flamboyant, or prominent. Something a little more discreet, a little more exclusive. Less in your face, as you might put it.

The ones who disagree with me are usually still on their way up. They want to maximise profit and do everything on as large a scale as possible, and a private champagne brand’s a vehicle for getting there. Often they’re already in wines and spirits and treating it as a line extension, or already in consumer goods and thinking about it commercially. That’s a different project and I can help with it. It’s just not the same project.

What it’s actually for

I’ve another client who owns and runs several businesses. The name he’s chosen for his champagne is the theme that guides how he runs everything he owns. He told me it’s the guiding principle of the way he works.

The logo matters even more to him than the name. It comes from something that happened not long after his father died. He experienced it as a message from him, tied to a memory the two of them had shared. There’s almost a spiritual element to what he’s chosen, and it’s entirely about authenticity.

He’s clear about what he wants, which makes my work easier. But it does more than that. It adds substance and meaning to the project itself, and it gives him a story to wrap around the brand that nobody else could have.

That’s the part people don’t see coming. They arrive thinking about a purchase, and somewhere in the middle of choosing the shade of a colour they find out they’re making something. It’s a validation of everything they’ve achieved. It’s a source of pleasure that’s very, very difficult to reproduce anywhere else. It’s something very personal, and it goes to the heart of their own identity.

Even when the investment’s considerable, and it is, it’s not simply a financial transaction.

If you’re thinking about a brand of your own, the useful next step is a conversation rather than a brochure. I’ll tell you what’s involved, what it’ll cost, and whether what you’ve got in mind will actually work.

Book a call.