It’s easy to forget about your retail packaging. And especially so if your sales are doing well.

But Dark Horse, a wine company, changed its packaging to better reflect the taste of its wine and increased sales by 15% year-over-year. This also blew away the average sales increases for the same time period versus other wines in the same category.

And the changes weren’t even necessarily that dramatic. The label and packaging gave the product a slightly darker look than before. Just three words were added to each label to give customers an idea of how the wine tasted. And the logo, a horse head, was made a bit more prominent.

When first on store shelves (prior to any packaging design change), Dark Horse took the industry by storm and generated tens of millions in sales in just its first year.

So it was really doing just fine. But the company, along with its marketing agency, learned that competitors were getting edgier in their marketing too. So Dark Horse was starting to blend in with the competition.

They saw that they could more clearly communicate about the wine’s taste also. That would be a win for customers.

The company’s goal is also to bring new people into the wine category. They weren’t necessarily looking to simply stand out to existing wine aficionados.

One Particularly Notable Example of Standing Out from the Competition

The labeling for Dark Horse’s rose-flavored wine was actually just like everyone else’s labels.

In that category, rose usually has a white or silver label and cap with a light-colored typeface.

But to stand out, Dark Horse went with a coppery-pink label, a black horse head logo, and a black cap.

Of course, this stands out when you see Dark Horse wine on store shelves.

The Proof is in The Results

Consumers were surveyed about the revamped labeling for Dark Horse. And they agreed that the new label helped them markedly versus the old labels.

A third-party evaluation of consumers found that nearly twice as many consumers would purchase Dark Horse wine with the new labeling.

Not only that, but Dark Horse has the highest packaging perceptions amongst all of its competitors.

The Top Clue That Made It Clear This Would Work

With any business initiative, you want to have some sort of leading indicators you can study that will tell you whether your new approach will work, right?

Well, in the case of Dark Horse, consumers, retail partners, and Dark Horse’s own sales team all agreed the new labeling was awesome.

And the proof, as you have read, came in the results.

By the way, you can read the full Dark Horse story here.