Our Process

Strategic Positioning & Evocative Design Are Essential

CF Napa has created hundreds of successful brands through the years. Like people, each brand is unique with its own personality, history, and story to tell. While the labels and packaging solutions that we have created are wildly different from one another, there is a common thread behind each one—CF Napa’s unique methodology for creating successful brands. Our methodology is based on one fundamental lesson we’ve learned: differentiated strategic positioning and evocative design are both essential for establishing an emotional and cognitive connection between consumer and brand. When historical truth, culture, lifestyle, and strategic positioning are balanced correctly in artful design, the results are both visually appealing and commercially successful.

To create a label and packaging that serves both the aesthetic and commercial ambitions of a beverage, we begin by uncovering a brand’s essence: the underlying values, guiding principles, and hidden attributes that are at the core of the brand and make it unique.

We Listen Carefully to Our Clients

First, we listen. We sit down with our clients and listen carefully to their dreams and ambitions and to the story behind their enterprise and brand. We probe gently to identify the core elements that define their product and make it stand out from its competitors. We also like to visit the property to get a feeling for the place and its aesthetics. Once the core elements have been given focus, we incorporate our own wealth of consumer insights, cultural understandings, and market expertise. Through this process, a unique brand story is brought to life and provides the foundation for us to create exceptional design solutions. Getting this foundation established is key, because even the most exceptional design and technique will never hide a poor idea.

Strategic Versus Decorative

In this day of everything digital, many might find our next step to be rather surprising—we start with sketches drawn by hand. This allows us to quickly explore ideas and provides a direct, tactile feel that we would not get from a computer. More importantly, ideas are judged by their strategic merit rather than pure aesthetic appeal. From those initial sketches, we slowly evolve our various design concepts then narrow down the field to polish our final concepts digitally. Next, we refine–and often refine some more–until we finally attain a design and packaging solution that catalyzes that all-important emotional and cognitive connection between brand and consumer. Positioning the brand in direct correlation to the consumer’s lifestyle, beliefs, interests and aspirations takes the consumer on a journey from awareness of the product, to the first trial, to advocacy and, ultimately, to enduring brand loyalty.