Cold Front Cider
Built an authentic craft cidery brand from the ground up and ran the entire marketing funnel.
Deliverables:
Brand identity, logo, labels, website, email campaigns, social media, paid ads, signage
Role:
Brand creator, digital marketing lead
Year:
2024 – Present
Client:
Cold Front Cidery
The Challenge
Cold Front Cider started as a blank slate. A new craft cidery in Prince George, BC with no brand, no website, and no name recognition. Everything needed to be built from the ground up, and I was the entire marketing team.
Most people hear "cider" and think of overly sweet commercial brands. We needed to educate a small-town market on what craft cider actually is, while earning community trust along the way. From day one, the guiding principle was simple: if it's not authentic, don't put it out. Everything we built came back to that.
The Approach
Audience — Women 19–65 as the core demographic for craft cider. But we kept the brand gender-neutral and authentic to the owners. The product is for everyone, and the marketing needed to reflect that.
Positioning — Authentic, relaxed, approachable, and fun. Most cideries lean either casual or upscale. We matched the brand to how the owners actually talk about cider: unpretentious, easygoing, and rooted.
Community — In a town like Prince George, local identity is everything. We participated in local events and positioned Cold Front as a hometown brand, not just a business that happens to be there. The best example is the Prince George Select: a limited cider made from local apples harvested through PG's bear mitigation program. Bear on the label. Every dollar from sales went to a local charity helping clean up the community.
That's the kind of marketing I believe in. Not manufactured campaigns dressed up as community involvement. Real initiatives that happen to also be great marketing.
The Execution
Brand & Identity — Simple, clean, and easygoing. The system needed to feel cohesive across labels, signage, social, and web without losing its warmth.
Website — Built to be easy to navigate and pleasant to scroll. The focus was the beauty of the cidery farm and real people enjoying it. Less product catalog, more invitation.
Email — Primarily event-focused, promoting tastings and local appearances. The goal was giving people everything they needed to show up without burying the details.
CLICK TO EXPAND
Social — Direct, friendly, important info upfront. The feed needed to feel like a friend telling you about something cool this weekend, not a brand broadcasting at you.
Ads — Boosted social posts with precise local targeting. Programmatic was too costly for an emerging brand, but boosted posts delivered strong returns at a fraction of the price.
The Outcome
1,650 social followers, up from ~40 at launch
$0.07–$0.24 cost per click for ads, well below industry average
8,000–13,000 views per ad campaign
140% increase in daily sales on days promoted by ads
Dozens of wholesale accounts and multiple event invitations across PG, and general brand recognition growing in the community
Reflection
This project showed me how direct the link between ad spend and revenue can be at a small scale. Ads ran, sales went up. The correlation was immediate and obvious.
It also reinforced something I already believed: marketing is better when you genuinely care about what you're selling. Authenticity isn't something you can fake.