A California road trip helped a Minneapolis design firm bring Lagunitas back to its roots

Take it from Joe Cecere, CEO of Minneapolis strategic design firm Little & Company: Exploring northern California beaches and small-town bars via a bus stocked with coolers of beer certainly is fun.

But it also was work for Cecere and his team. The trip was a deep dive into the roots of Lagunitas Brewing Company, from the beachfronts that helped inspire the pioneer craft beer brand to a stop at founder Tony Magee's house.

"With that tour, talking to their marketing team, talking to other people around the organization, we wanted to unpack the true story of Lagunitas," Cecere said.

Little's assignment: Create a fully redesigned packaging portfolio for all of the beers as well as a campaign to relaunch the flagship Lagunitas IPA.

The goal: Reconnect with the grit and irreverence that helped make Lagunitas iconic in a bid to reinvigorate drinkers who had strayed from the brand while also introducing it to new audiences.

The challenge: Counter industry trends that have seen younger consumers choose seltzers, cocktails or THC drinks, turn to non-alcoholic options or forgo drinking alcohol entirely.

Overall, U.S. beer production and imports were down 5% in 2023 while craft brewer volume sales declined by 1%, according to an April report from the Brewers Association, which represents small and independent American craft brewers. Lagunitas ranked fifth in beer sales volume among U.S. craft brewers in 2013, according to the association.

Magee brewed his first batch in 1993. Dutch brewing giant Heineken bought half of Lagunitas in 2015 and the rest in 2017. Lagunitas has "a rich past, a rich history" but is "a little quirky," Cecere said.

"It had a personality to it that wasn't corporate," he added. "It was very homespun. It was very real and authentic."

That perception changed, however, as Lagunitas grew bigger and Heineken completed its acquisition. After a previous update, its packaging and branding "all became kind of vanilla and kind of overly consistent," Cecere said, adding that those changes made the brand "appear bigger" than it was at heart.

"It lost its soul. It lost its personality," he said. "We wanted to get some of that heritage back while providing consistency across their brand."

The solution

The field trip to the brewery's home base in Petaluma, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Francisco, helped Little staff imagine new but more authentic ways to present Lagunitas in words, images and video.

The agency, for example, wrote new "lip quips," stories or slogans printed at the top of each can "in a way that fit [Lagunitas'] personality in a more relevant way," Cecere said.

Going back to the brand's beginning, Little's designers took cues from the stenciled, homespun way "IPA" appeared on its first cans and brought back that look.

"There was a very homemade aspect to the way he built the brand," Cecere said. "So we took inspiration from the typography, the look and feel of it and made it a little bit rougher around the edges. It has a little texture to it so it doesn't feel as polished because that's where they started."

The IPA campaign used Reddit to reach younger consumers with online videos and storytelling "that really attracted that new consumer while not alienating" existing ones, Cecere said. The videos retraced Little's field work, taking place in and around Petaluma.

The young people in the cast for those campaign videos had some acting experience but also knew each other in real life.

"It was a group of friends hanging out and really captured the moment of them being together," Cecere said. "It was occasion-based and around what you do with the beer, with friends and family in the campaign. It's more about the activity and the engagement with people vs. a taste profile or 'tastes great, less filling.'"

In addition to social and video channels, the campaign includes in-store and out-of-home advertising, or ads consumers see on billboards, benches or elsewhere. Lagunitas is investing more than half of its marketing budget in this initiative.

"It feels fresh compared to what's out there, and it feels right for them," Cecere said.

Cecere joined Little in 1999 and bought the agency last year from founder Monica Little, who launched it in 1979. Little's clients include financial services, consumer package goods, technology and manufacturing companies. Local clients include Landscape Structures and Bremer Bank, with U.S. Bank and St. Paul's Capital City Bikeway tapping it for a new branding campaigns in 2016.

The results

Nationally, Lagunitas IPA's velocity — or sales per distribution point — is up 4% since the new packaging began appearing in the first week of July, according to Nielsen figures.

"So far, it's been very successful," Cecere said. "Internally, the team at both Lagunitas and Heineken love all the work and are very excited about it. It feels more like them. There's a pride with employees at Lagunitas now that they feel more connected to the brand than they ever have."

Recharging the Lagunitas brand and product portfolio is a once in a lifetime opportunity, Lagunitas' Chief Marketing Officer Hannah Dray said in a statement.

"Our charge is to reinvigorate the brand, to bring back the confidence and the personality that once made it relevant and famous," Dray said. "Our partnership with Little has been a collective labor of love as we both share the passion and thirst for reviving our iconic flagship Lagunitas IPA."

Todd Nelson is a freelance writer in Lake Elmo. His e-mail is todd_nelson@mac.com.