Wedge-Designed Ami Ami Shows That Boxed Wine Can Be Pretty Gosh Darn Cool
by Rudy Sanchez on 03/15/2023 | 3 Minute Read
France is one of the world's largest and most renowned wine producers, and consumers are attracted to French wines because of the country’s reputation for its viticultural heritage, flavor, and quality.
Shipping bottles of wine from the Gallic nation to far-flung destinations might delight the palate of wine drinkers far from French soil, but it still comes at an environmental cost—glass bottles are heavy and fragile, increasing the amount of greenhouse gas pollution emitted in transportation compared to lighter materials like cardboard.
Ami Ami is a new French wine brand that opts for boxes instead of bottles to minimize its carbon footprint. Boxed wine has the advantage of lighter packaging and more efficient stocking and stacking. To overcome the lower-quality perception of boxed wine, Ami Ami enlisted studio Wedge to design an approachable brand that communicates quality, challenging the studio to create packaging worthy of the MoMA store.
The winemaker selected one-and-a-half liter boxes for their portability and fun size. The Ami Ami logo incorporates half-circles meant to represent cups of wine. Ten more half-circles, the number of cups in a box, cover multiple panels, adding dimensionality to the packaging design. Playful illustrations found inspiration in Italian futurist Fortunato Depero's work, the designer of the Campari soda bottle.
The visuals help bring attention to callouts that detail the brand’s sustainability qualities, such as the 50% reduction in carbon footprint over glass. Typography also borrows from the imprints found on French wine crates.
Color palettes are kept simple and wine-inspired. Ami Ami’s white blend uses greens and yellows, and the red blend uses different shades of red.
Wedge’s Ami Ami design captures the brand’s unfussy approachability with a chic style that invites impromptu pours of wine rather than signaling it’s a vino reserved for special occasions. By using a box instead of bottles, Ami Ami reduces its environmental impact by doling out less greenhouse emissions and looks pretty, pretty, pretty good doing so.