A family-owned Adelaide brewery believed they knew their customer. Six weeks of discovery work suggested otherwise — and reframed a brand modernisation project into something far more interesting.
Rundle Brewing Co. has operated out of Hindmarsh since 1987. Third-generation owner Marcus Paech inherited a business with a loyal but ageing tap-room crowd, a regional distribution deal through two bottle shops in Semaphore and Prospect, and a brand identity that hadn't been touched since 2004. Sales were flat. A younger sibling had just returned from a stint at a Melbourne craft brewery and wanted to push into the growing SA craft scene.
The family engaged us with a clear brief: redesign the brand and launch a new core range targeting the 25–38 craft beer drinker, without alienating the existing base. They had already briefed a graphic designer on a new visual identity.
We know our regulars. What we don't know is how to get the next lot through the door without making the first lot feel like we've sold out.
— Marcus Paech, Managing DirectorThe instinct was to treat this as a brand and marketing problem. Discovery work suggested it was something else entirely.
Before any brief is accepted at face value, we run a structured discovery phase. In this case, the presenting problem (a brand identity) didn't match the underlying anxiety (losing cultural continuity). That gap needed investigation before any design work could begin.
Three separate sessions with Marcus, his sister Elke (operations), and their father Don (founder, semi-retired). Each described a different brewery. Marcus saw a craft pivot. Elke saw an operational risk. Don described the tap room as a third place for tradespeople in Hindmarsh — not a product, a community. The misalignment within the business itself became finding number one.
We spent four sessions in the tap room across different times and days — two weekday afternoons, a Friday night, and a Sunday session. We interviewed 14 customers. The demographic split surprised the family: 38% were under 35. The craft beer audience was already there. They just weren't being spoken to by the brand, the menu, or the staff. Several described feeling like guests rather than regulars.
Mapped 11 SA craft operators from big (Pirate Life, Prancing Pony) to independent (Mismatch, Big Shed). Rundle's gap wasn't quality or range — it was narrative. Every credible craft brand in SA had a strong founding story, a place identity, or an irreverent voice. Rundle had none of these in any externally visible form, despite having all three sitting dormant in Don's stories about the Hindmarsh site.
Cross-referenced a mailing list with tap room visit frequency data and identified 43 customers who had visited regularly 18+ months ago but stopped. Contacted 22. Of those, 16 responded. The most common reason for lapsing wasn't product quality or price — it was that the tap room felt like it hadn't changed in years and they felt quietly unwelcome as they got older, started families, or shifted lifestyle. Not that they'd been excluded. Just... not invited back.
Across 47 data points, three patterns emerged with enough consistency to structure the final deliverable around. The brief was formally reframed in a working session with Marcus and Elke. Don attended and reportedly teared up when his tap room description was read back to him as a design principle.
The central assumption driving the brief was that Rundle's existing customer base and their target customer base were two separate populations. Discovery revealed they were almost the same people at different life stages.
Loyal older drinkers (40–60, male, tradespeople) vs. craft-curious new audience (25–38, mixed, lifestyle-driven). The assumption was that serving one would alienate the other, and that a brand pivot meant leaving someone behind.
The 45-year-old regular and the 28-year-old craft beer enthusiast shared a value: belonging to a place that had character and history. The product was almost incidental. The barrier wasn't demographic — it was that the brewery had never articulated what it actually was.
Loyal customers described the beer consistently well — smooth, honest, unpretentious. But when asked to describe the brand, most drew a blank. Strong product equity with zero brand equity is an opportunity, not a failure — if you move quickly.
Every stakeholder interview with a long-term customer eventually surfaced a story about Don or the Hindmarsh building. The brewery's history was its most differentiated attribute and it existed entirely in oral tradition — nothing written, nothing designed around it.
38% of tap room visitors in our observation sessions were under 35. The acquisition problem the family feared had already partially solved itself. The retention problem — giving that cohort a reason to stay and return — had not been addressed at all.
The original brief — redesign the brand and launch a new core range targeting 25–38 craft drinkers — wasn't wrong, but it was solving from the wrong starting point. A visual rebrand aimed at a younger demographic would have signalled to the existing base that something had been taken from them, without giving the new audience a compelling reason to commit.
"Redesign the brand to attract a younger craft audience."
"Surface and articulate what Rundle has always been, so both audiences can finally recognise themselves in it."
This shift moved the engagement from a brand execution project into a brand foundations project — establishing narrative, tone, and audience positioning before any visual or product decisions were made. The graphic designer already briefed was brought into the discovery outputs and redirected accordingly.
The engagement concluded with a documented discovery package handed to the client and their wider agency team. No visual design was produced — that wasn't the scope. What was produced shaped every downstream decision.