Pendo rebrands Dickie’s Ginger for a new generation of drinkers.
The cold-pressed, non-alcoholic ginger beer is made in Vancouver with fresh-juiced ginger and real fruit, and has built a loyal local following while sitting in a category that takes itself far too seriously. For the rebrand that would change that, Dickie’s turned to Pendo, a Vancouver brand and creative agency. “Ginger beers lean into an old-time aesthetic, harkening to some bygone era of authenticity and nostalgia,” Owner Stephen Tufts explains of the romance of provenance and nature that Dickie's wanted none of.
“Focusing purely on deliciousness, our quality of craft, pursuing joyful consumption versus functional qualities, represents something of a radical act in our modern relationship to our food,” he continues. Pendo translated that conviction through the worlds Dickie’s already moves in – the local brewery scene, cocktail culture and a counter-culture crowd – positioning it as the drink of a new generation that cares about what it consumes but feels no need to romanticise it. “We were inspired by music festival branding, rave flyers and punk show posters,” reveals Peter Ladd, Creative Director & Co-Founder at Pendo. “This is where Dickie’s was showing up and we wanted to continue that.”
Pendo’s answer began with the star of the show: ginger. The agency was drawn to how irregular it is – every root knobbly and a little weird, no two pieces alike – and surprised that competitors weren’t doing anything with it. So they bought a lot of ginger, sliced it in half to capture the shapes, traced them and refined from there. What turned those shapes into a character was the eyes. “It wasn’t until we added eyes and gave it a personality that it really clicked,” Ladd tells us. The abstracted root became Dickie, a character with enough life to spin off a family of relations across the range.
Keeping that character from tipping into kids’ territory fell partly to the wordmark, a fully custom piece developed with typographer Nathan Metzler. It had to be bold enough to stand out on a shelf and condensed enough to fit on a narrow can, with the round, odd shapes of ginger worked into the letterforms but stopped short of caricature, down to the drop-shaped apostrophe in DICKIE’S. “We didn’t want this to come off too playful or like a sugary drink for kids,” Ladd explains, “so the restraint needed to balance out between the two” – the type pulling against the illustration. Around it sit two Pangram Pangram typefaces: Editorial New, saved for headlines and marketing, and the utilitarian Montreal Mono for descriptive detail, both set against the rounded ginger forms to capture the raw, DIY tone the brand was after.
That instinct to pull back runs through the art direction, where the brief was to look unforced. Every touchpoint – setup, lighting, textures, product and ingredient shots – was directed to feel imperfect. “When it felt too curated or perfect, we scrapped it,” Ladd details; the studio even kept a board of the big brands on view as a reminder to do the opposite. The same thinking redirected the photography, with tabletop ingredient shots tried and dropped because, as Ladd puts it, they “began feeling like other product brands.” In their place came close-cropped, low-fi images of raw ginger under hard light, sitting almost like a backdrop so the character and content stayed in front. Raw against polished was the real balancing act – the brand still had to feel like something you would want in your fridge year-round – and Pendo leaned on showing the back of house, the brewery and the filling line, to keep it feeling, in Ladd’s words, like “a product made locally by the same people you hang out with.”
Across the four varietals, colour is the differentiator. Pendo tuned each one to its flavour but kept the palette deliberately grown-up – “a more adult/health conscious vibe,” in Ladd’s description, “not going too bright” – so the cans never look like sugary pop. The ginger illustration stays constant on every can, with only the eyes shifting from one to the next to give each its own attitude.
The response has surprised even Tufts, who has spent decades in underground music scenes and had let the brand’s own imagery grow stale. “It’s been universal praise, which really never happens,” he adds, noting that even the austere cocktail bars he was unsure about have come around. For him, it lands on a wider shift he is happy to ride: “We’re moving pretty quickly away from minimalism and greige.”
All images © of their respective owners.
Content taken from Dickie's Ginger
