Designing Rumor Rosé: Evolving a Premium Wine Brand's Visual System

When Rumor Rosé approached me in 2024, the foundations were in place. An organic Côtes de Provence rosé distributed across more than 20 countries, poured at well-known venues, with bottle, wordmark, and photography already defined. What didn't yet exist was the system around them. How the typography behaves at 8pt and at 200pt. What paper carries which message. How the brand reads in print, on a sales sheet, in a deck, on a phone screen.

The brief was system work. Bilingual sell sheets, a reference deck for stakeholders, social templates the marketing team could run without me, and a website redesign at proposal stage.

This is how it came together.

The Challenge: Multiple Formats, One Brand

Rumor needed materials for very different contexts. Sales teams needed print sell sheets for distributor meetings and web versions for email. Executives needed a deck that worked for investor conversations. Marketing needed Story templates. The website needed a redesign.

Each format has its own technical reality. Print runs on CMYK at high resolution. Web is RGB, optimized for weight. Decks need to land at projector size and at thumbnail. Social is mobile-first. None of that should be visible to the reader. The brand should feel like one thing across all of it.

Most brands handle this by splitting the work across specialists. The output is rarely cohesive. The system has to be in one head.

Establishing Visual Foundations

Before designing the assets themselves, I worked on the rules. The typography system had to hold up in both French and English, with display weights for headlines and a readable companion face for wine specs. The color system had to keep the pale rosé reading authentically across photography without drifting into novelty pink. The layout principles leaned on white space and French typographic conventions: small caps for back-of-bottle copy, indented paragraph openings, a serif-sans pairing that reads editorial rather than corporate.

Not a rulebook. A working framework that lets a designer, a distributor, or a journalist find what they need without translation.

Bilingual Sales Materials

Four sell sheet variants. English print, English web, French print, French web. Same information architecture, different technical optimization.

A wine sell sheet has a lot to carry: appellation, grape varieties, winemaker, tasting notes, technical specs, pairings, pricing. The job is to hold all of that without feeling crammed. Hero product shot on top, vineyard and process in the middle, technical specs accessible but not loud, pairings as the closer.

The bilingual side was more than translation. French and English handle wine vocabulary differently, and the rhythm of the sentences shifts the layout. The two versions are linguistic siblings, not copies of each other.

Built to work in distributor portfolios, at trade shows, in retailer presentations, and in email, without being redesigned each time.

The reference deck

A 30+ page deck that became the brand's reference document. Written for multiple audiences in the same file: investors, distributors, trade media, internal teams. The structure covers founder Barry Bayat's vision, the Provence terroir, winemaker Pierre Guérin and his 30+ years of experience, the seasonal evolution of the wine, distribution across 20+ countries, press, and the team behind it.

The English and French versions are not direct translations. The French version leans into Provence heritage because that is what French readers expect. The English version leads with founder story and global reach because that is what travels.

Built so a designer, a distributor, or a journalist can land in the deck and find what they need without explanation. The team now reuses individual slides from it in other contexts.

Digital Presence: Website and Social

The website redesign was delivered at Figma stage. Desktop and mobile, every page, ready for development. The desktop carries the photography full-bleed and lets typography do the rest. The mobile keeps the same hierarchy at thumb scale.

The site that ships at rumorrose.com today went a different direction. What was delivered was the proposal handoff: a complete development roadmap with every screen, interaction, and breakpoint specified.

For social, I built a suite of Instagram Story templates the marketing team can update without me. Product highlights, seasonal moments, venue features, press quotes, behind-the-scenes. Same visual grammar across all of them, so the feed stays Rumor whether or not a designer touched it that week.

Photography direction (proposal)

Beyond the system work, I also put together a photography direction proposal through Chronos Studio. The brand's existing bottle photography was already in place, so this was exploratory: a set of suggestions for where the imagery could go if Rumor wanted to extend its photographic range.

The exploration leaned on Provence-inspired settings and natural light, with multiple background variations, lifestyle and product compositions, and careful color work on the pale rosé so it reads authentically rather than artificially enhanced.

The proposal was not adopted into the active asset library. It sits here as a directional reference for how the visual language could extend, and as a working example of the Chronos workflow applied to a wine brand.

Why the system matters

The point of the work is not the individual files. It is how they hold together.

Because the system was built first, every piece downstream connects. The sell sheets and the deck share the same typographic logic. The website and the Story templates speak the same visual language. The pieces feel like they came from one place, because they did.

The practical benefit: Rumor's team can produce new materials on their own with confidence that nothing will drift. A future designer can pick up the system without reinventing it. The brand reads consistently whether someone meets it in a distributor portfolio, on Instagram, or on a retailer's shelf.

For premium wine, that consistency carries weight. Premium positioning lives or dies at every touchpoint. Inconsistent materials quietly undermine the price tag. A working system holds it up.

Key Lessons for Premium Wine Branding

What's next

The system in place at Rumor today supports the day-to-day. The sell sheets travel with the sales team. The deck does its job in stakeholder meetings. The Story templates keep the feed coherent without a designer in the loop. The website designs are still on the shelf as a reference for whoever picks up the next iteration.

The value of doing this work as a system rather than as a stack of one-off files only becomes obvious over time. As the brand adds products, enters new markets, and brings in new collaborators, the system absorbs that growth without fragmenting. That is the whole point.

For other wine and spirits brands looking at the same kind of work: do not commission the assets first. Commission the system. The assets fall out of it.