Moonshine Meadery | 123Story of the moon Rohan Rehani, co-founder of Indian mead start-up Moonshine Meadery, tells the story behind its eye-catching labels. Akanksha Meena reports hobby turned into a business, Moonshine has made waves in the Indian alcobev market with its out-of-the-box favored meads and label design concept. The brand gained further A popularity when it appeared on the business reality television show Shark Tank India. Mechanical engineer Rohan Rehani and ex-McKinsey employee Nitin Vishwas transformed their hobby into a business, launching Moonshine Meadery in 2018. The story of Moonshine’s label design began with a minimalist Scandinavian logo of uppercase and lowercase ‘M’ which Rehani says received positive customer feedback. Depending on the SKU, the color of the label and text would change but the overall design remained the same. The start-up introduced wordplay around its logo to create customer engagement on social media with ‘Mm’ standing out in slogans such as ‘IMmune to bullshit’. Rehani recalls he saw people wearing t-shirts bearing the slogans. This convinced the founders that there was a scope for clever marketing behind the (L-R) Nitin Vishwas and Rohan Rehani, co-founders of Moonshine Meaderyoriginal logo. However, as the business brewed, the duo realized that there “To have a bee as a mascot for a were several constraints surrounding the logo. ‘One was that we had misjudged the target audience,’ says Rehani. ‘When Vishwas honey-derived drink made the most and I frst started, we priced the meads at 220 INR [2.92 USD] so that consumers above 30 years of age would be able to buy them logical sense. But honestly, that’s and would like minimalist designs. We were, of course, wrong. Young India has the power to spend on products that appeal to them. why we didn’t want it”‘The second thing was that while all our communications were about Moonshine, we hadn’t realized that “Mm” was the biggest Another thing Moonshine was sure of was collaborating thing on the visible on the bottle.’ with artists. The brand faced a peculiar problem. Customers would walk When More came up with the moon logo, Rehani thought it was into liquor shops asking for Moonshine only to be told that it radical as an idea. A white circle in the middle morphed with label is not available. When a customer notifed the co-founders of design was unique and integral to the brand identity. the unavailability, Vishwas called in to a shop in Chembur that ‘Both Vishwas and I were like – whoa! More came back with 8-9 was selling Moonshine meads, but was told that the product different artworks and rough sketches to show us how the entire was unavailable. architecture pops out when you line the bottles together.’ ‘Vishwas called me and said either the stock is selling out too The circle in the center of the label with the brand name fast (within eight hours of shipment) or the shopkeeper doesn’t Moonshine beneath, along with the name of the mead, remains know what Moonshine is.’ consistent in the design. The company contacted several He went to the store and asked for Moonshine and received the artists across India and asked them to design something using expected response. But Vishwas pointed out the Moonshine meads the template. stacked neatly behind the shopkeeper, to which the latter replied: ‘The product inside of the bottle is so handcrafted that we ‘Oh, you mean “M-M”!’ wanted the label – our identity – to be integral with the artwork. The brand launched in February 2018 and by June the problem Instead of treating our logo as sacrosanct and saying you cannot was apparent. Rehani and Vishwas started looking for a design touch it, we wanted the artist to overlap the logo by 20-25 percent. agency and found The Jungle Gym and its founder Nikhil More. The circle is such a universal symbol that you can do so much with ‘We told them we wanted a visual-forward brand language. Prior it, and it worked!’to that we had text-heavy brand language which was nice and fun but we felt several constraints. When we realized the target group Collaborating with artists was much younger, the bottle needed to be a lot more visually The co-founders chanced upon their frst artist, illustrator and striking,’ Rehani explains. graphic novel artist Anand Radhakrishnan, at a Starbucks coffee He was determined to do away with the animal or insect shop where they noticed him sketching them. Radhakrishnan was mascots that are popular among craft brewers. ‘To have a bee as a commissioned to design Moonshine’s Apple Cyder mead. ‘In the mascot for a honey-derived drink made the most logical sense. But rough sketches he came up with, the cross-section of the apple also honestly, that’s why we didn’t want it – because it made logical looks a lot like an owl’s face. He morphed the circle into an owl’s sense. We were very unconventional in such a way that we didn’t face. He used the 25 percent rule very well,’ Rehani says. want to belong to this industry for any logical reason. The second artist was Aniruddh Mehta, a designer, visual artist, ‘We decided to do this out of a passion which became a hobby. art director and a DJ known for his work in Sacred Games, a Netfix Everyone said, why not make beer – something people already series. Mehta designed his own favorite variant – the Coffee mead. understand. That’s the point: if everyone is zigging, we wanted to zag.’ His art style includes repetitive patterns and elements of coffee and Jan - Mar 2022