How FCKLCK gave alcohol-free brand SHWUNG a full wine disguise — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

When Simon Martens and Milan van Nuffel approached Antwerp and Austin-based FCKLCK Studio to design new labels for their alcohol-free wine brand SHWUNG, the brief already had a constraint baked in: a forced name change from SOBR. Rather than treat the work as packaging, the studio took on the harder question underneath it all. How do you sell something that isn’t wine like it’s wine?

The answer sits on every bottle. Spumante becomes [spuh-man-tay]. Vermouth Rosso becomes [vehr-mut ros-soh]. Orange becomes [or-anj]. Each product is named the way its wine-style equivalent sounds when spoken aloud in its language of origin, written inside square brackets the same way a dictionary shows pronunciation. The names are familiar enough to register as wine and altered enough to make clear they are not. This small yet significant tension flows throughout the entire identity.

Getting there meant going deep into the category first. James Krüger, Founder & Creative Director at FCKLCK, grew up in Stellenbosch, the centre of South African wine country, which gave him a long view of the conventions worth keeping and the ones worth defying. The team studied how different regions handle their packaging, from classic traditionalists to new-world upstarts, and the decision was made early and shared with the client straight away. “To position a non-alcoholic botanical drink as a wine replacement and for it to work, we needed to go full wine nerd,” Krüger explains. “Bottle choices, label hierarchy, the pompous ignorance you find on serious wine packaging. We had to go so deep into the world of wine that the product was instantly at home there.”

With that in mind, each variant uses the bottle that matches the wine style it stands in for, so the sparkling sits in a sparkling bottle and the rosé in a rosé bottle, and so on. No conventions broken there. The label itself is eye-stopping in shape and conformist in everything else, making it distinct enough to stand out on shelf without over-explaining its point of difference. The hierarchy follows wine to the letter: grape and variety take centre stage, with style, flavour notes and product type stepping down beneath in smaller type, reading as one continuous description from the phonetic name down to what the drink actually is.

The closeness to wine answered a problem felt by SHWUNG’s founders. The brand operates in the wine proxy category, where most alternatives are built around what the drinker is giving up. “I think the non-alcoholic category started as a category of compromise,” Martens tells us. “SHWUNG isn’t about drinking less. It’s about enjoying more. More flavour, more presence, more connection, more tomorrow.” The packaging needed to make that case in seconds on a shelf, against products people reach for only because they can’t have the real thing.

The phonetic system actually arrived late in the process, and from an unlikely place. Krüger knew he wanted an immediate wine association without borrowing real wine names, which were too confusing and too close. The idea stuck while he was doomscrolling on Instagram and landed on a carousel of food misspellings. Tumor Rick. Nugmet. Grilled Chinken. Coocie. Too goofy and too childish for wine, but it was the start of something. Frenglish, Denglish, Spanglish, Itanglese. The team spent hours listening to phonetic British and American voice translations of wine varietals in their original languages, picking the right sound and spelling for each name and taking creative licence where it was needed. The result names each drink to the exact varietal and region it replaces while building in wordplay that wine people actually enjoy. The phonetic naming is the only twist in an otherwise straight-faced wine system, as it carries all the disruption the brand needs. “It has, as the Dutch say, ‘een hoek af,’” Krüger jokes.

Martens did not see it that way at first. When the studio walked in with a system spelt out in phonetic blocks, his reaction was blunt. “I said: What the hell have you been smoking?” he reflects, scared consumers would not understand the naming, and certain the more unconventional label shapes could not be manufactured at scale. As the team talked through the thinking, the scepticism turned, and what stuck for him was the framework underneath: every new product strengthens the brand, each name another piece of a recognisable system.

Product names and key messaging break into phonetic blocks that stack vertically, and those blocks shape the proportions of the labels, the spacing and the rhythm of the graphic system. Language defines form, which is why the labels vary so widely in outline yet stay connected across a range that runs from a green sparkling bottle to a clear bottle of rosé. A thin central spine connects the irregular horizontal bars that house each phonetic break. On a curved bottle surface, with the team holding to between 2mm and 5mm of clearance, that spine is the kind of thing most printers would rather avoid. The fix came from asking suppliers the right way, posing it as a chance to do something nobody else had done.

The typography is a duo from Klim Type Foundry: Feijoa Medium and Founders Grotesk X-Condensed. Feijoa had been sitting in Krüger’s trial fonts folder for years, tested on project after project and never quite right. “The moment we tried it on SHWUNG, it refused to be ignored,” he tells us. A contemporary serif worthy of both wine heritage and modernity. The serif and sans pairing is a staple of wine labels, leaned into deliberately, but pushed further than the convention usually goes. Founders Grotesk X-Condensed brings a sharper contrast through its narrow build, and solved a practical constraint at the same time. With identical type sizes set across every label regardless of bottle or volume, and clearance tight everywhere, its space efficiency made it the obvious carrier for style descriptors, flavour notes and the legal copy needed for non-alcoholic drink regulations.

The palette is restrained through a warm grey, black and white, with fluorescent yellow as the one disruptive note. That yellow, however, was not planned. Krüger uses bright colour blocks in Illustrator to track type placement, which is exactly what the yellow was doing against the neutral grey when someone on the team noticed how good it looked. “We said FCK’it, let’s roll with it.”

For the photography, products are shot inverted and slightly blurred against warm, opaque gradients. “We wanted imagery that felt dreamy and direct at the same time,” Krüger explains. The gradients tie back to terroir and submersion in natural liquids, with the floating, drifting atmosphere quietly introducing the bottles rather than feeling like posed pack shots.

Since the rebrand went live, the bottles have done more work than the founders expected. On a sales trip in Bruges, Martens and his team tried a cold walk-in at a Michelin-starred restaurant, called the chef from outside, and were nearly brushed off. They convinced him to glance at the website. “About 10 seconds after seeing the bottles and the brand, we had an appointment,” Martens reveals. He invited them in to present. For a young brand in a category most people are still learning about, an identity that makes the product sound like wine, read like wine and behave like wine, without ever claiming to be wine, turns out to be the fastest way through the door.