Yesterday Gill and I attended Loddon Brewery's party to celebrate their tenth year of being in business and more importantly to unveil their new brewery branding. The party was held at the Bird in Hand-Sonning Common, owned by Roger Cox and Kay Thomas. Invitees were invited to sample five of Loddon's award winning ales and the fantastic food cooked by chef Roger.
I have always enjoyed Loddon beers and what is exciting is that are now bottling six of their finest ales all in their newly branded bottles. Available in bottles will be Hoppit, Hullabaloo, Russet, Ferryman's Gold, Bamboozle and Forbury Lion. A great selection.
Chris Hearn made a short speech to the guests:
"After 10 months of development, we are delighted to be able to show off our new company branding. Everything from the brewery logo, our pump clips, our bottled beer labels to our headed paper has been re-designed. Our new branding is more current than what we had previously and will appeal to a far wider customer base. Although, to reflect our traditional beers and respect the historic nature of the industry, we haven’t made radical changes. Instead we have elaborated upon design aspects we already had, for example, our Dragonfly logo is now far more prominent."
"We took the decision to modernise our company image because this year we celebrate our 10th Birthday. After establishing our place in the British brewing industry, we felt it was important not to rest on our laurels. We’re very confident the work we have done with design company ‘We are Pure’, will stand us in good stead for the next decade."
Chris added more about their new website:
"With all the work we have done on our branding, it was only natural to have a website that was in the same league. Therefore, we contacted ‘Nzime’, a creative agency in Nottingham, and set the ball rolling. Our new website is fantastically easy to navigate and fully incorporates social media, something we dedicate a lot of time too. We have also tried to make the site as interactive as possible, for example, Steve our head brewer introduces each permanent beer via a short video. There is also a video of Chris describing the excellent raw materials that make Loddon beer. Each beer has it’s own page, making it far easier for our customers to choose which beer they’d like. We’ve cut out the tasting notes ‘waffle’ and instead replaced these with short, concise descriptions backed up with a bar chart highlighting the predominant flavours of each beer."
"Due to ‘Nzime’ working closely with our design company ‘We Are Pure’, the continuation of our new branding can be seen clearly across the website. The brief was to make the site appealing to our existing customers as well as our new target markets. It is fresh and fun yet informative, exactly what we were hoping for."
www.loddonbrewery.com
Loddon Brewery is definitely one of Henley's success stories and the new branding and website can only lead to further growth. Loddon have also been great in their usage of the social media platforms of Facebook and Twitter to engage with their drinkers.
Thanks to the Hearn's for inviting us last night and good luck with the new branding and website. Phil Chappell