Three weeks of getting it wrong,
then three hours of getting it right
By Ali, Brand & Growth Strategist ·
Most case studies skip the part where the work does not land. This one is mostly that part. We spent three weeks going in the wrong direction on Tivo, twice, on a timeline that had no room for either mistake. What unlocked it was not a better idea. It was changing the way we worked with the client.
The Tivo story.
Ben came to us in June with a problem most brands would love to have. The product was finished. Two years of work on the liquid, three flavours, and it was already selling in his own bars in Manchester. One of them was even outselling Aperol two to one on his menus. What he did not have was a bottle he believed in.
He had been through three agencies before us. Good ones, the kind that work with big corporate brands. Every single time he got back something that looked, in his words, corporate. Safe. Or the opposite: modern, clean, but completely soulless.
So when the brief landed, it sounded genuinely fun. A new British apéritif trying to carve out space next to Aperol, built for rooftops and music festivals and Tuesday nights. Then came the second half of the brief: the bottles go into production in July. We had under 3 weeks.
“Working at a studio you’re constantly battling with the fact that great design needs time. But we’re an ambitious team and we tend to say yes to short timelines because we believe in our work and honestly can’t push away a cool project everyone is excited to work on. Ben’s brief was fun, the product was already proving itself in real life, and the whole team wanted in. Sometimes the timeline picks you.” Palu Malerba, Founder of CreativeWise.
Round one: wrong.
We started where we always start. Research, then a brand universe before anything else. We went deep on British culture and what “cool” actually means for someone reaching for a spritz after work in London. We looked at Palace Skateboards, Martine Rose, Stüssy. We looked at Peter Saville and Jamie Reid. Record shops, festivals, the world this drinker actually lives in. We built two directions out of that and sent them over.
Ben’s answer was polite and completely clear. Nice work, wrong feel. That happens. It is not a disaster, it is information. But it costs time, and we did not have much of it.
That round is also where Ben realised his brief was not giving us enough to work with. So he went away for a few days and put together a full brand book: the positioning, the words he wanted attached to Tivo, and a long list of references. Pimenta drinks. The Aperol UK Instagram account. Craft beer brands. It was the first time we could see the room he was standing in.
Round two: closer, still not it.
We rebuilt from scratch and pushed past moodboards. Instead of pure direction-setting we started playing with label shapes, cuts, typography, colour, etc. His feedback: the mood is right, the bottles are not. That was week three. Print deadline in ten days. And we were, honestly, stuck.
“The proposal kept missing. At some point it didn’t matter how creative I was being, if I couldn’t get inside how the client saw it. That’s the real service from our side, staying open and flexible enough to actually understand clients, so we can bring their ideas into reality, not just ours. As designers, we’re also translators.” Joy Arrieta, Brand & Web Designer of CreativeWise.
The thing we tried that we had never tried before.
At that point there are two options. Keep guessing, or change the format entirely. We proposed a workshop. An actual working session with the client in the room as a participant in the creative thinking. We spent 2 days building it. We pulled apart everything we had: his brand book, every message, both calls, the previous designs he had rejected. We turned it into a presentation with four parts. What we understood about the brand and where it sits in the category. Where our doubts were. Which specific elements from his references we thought we could take, broken down piece by piece. And a list of open questions about finishes, colour, and where the brand should sit between heritage and pop.
Then we asked him to talk over all of it. To explain, reference by reference, what he was actually seeing. That call changed the project. We learned the British angle could be dropped completely, which we had been protecting for three weeks. We learned that what he loved about Aperol was not the design, it was the mix: heritage cues like foil, embossing, a little gold seal, sitting under something modern. We learned the finishes were doing half the emotional work in every reference he had sent us. And we learned that the liquid colours were locked and vivid, so the labels needed to contrast them, not match them.
By the end of that call Joy and Justi knew exactly where to go. Colour, finish, logo, illustration style. All of it.
“The workshop completely shifted the project. Hearing Ben explain his references out loud gave us a level of clarity that weeks of feedback through messages and presentations never could. Something clicked once we all started solving the problem together. It became a genuinely collaborative process where we could ask questions, react to ideas and build on each other’s thoughts in real time.” Justi Antonacci, Designer of CreativeWise.
Then he told us the labels had to go to print in three days.
So we did a second thing we had never done before. We finished the design live. One call, three hours, screens shared, the whole team working in the file at the same time while Ben watched and directed. Ben is a visual person. Some people cannot brief in words, they need to see a thing and react to it. So we stopped asking him to describe what he wanted and gave him three pairs of hands instead.
I was on that call as a spectator. Watching three designers build a brand in real time with the client steering was one of the better things I have seen this year. Palu built colour combinations and dropped labels onto bottle mockups so we could judge contrast against the liquid in real time. Meanwhile, Justi worked the logo, testing weights, shapes, and how the wordmark sat inside the label frame. And Joy ran every version through AI as we went, so within minutes of a decision we could see the label in 3D with the foil applied, the embossing, the paper texture, on an actual bottle.
Joy’s renders unlocked more than anything else in that call. When you see a label flat on a screen, you cannot picture what the paper, the foil and the embossing will do to it. Ben kept saying the designs looked basic, and he was not wrong about what he was looking at. Then the first 3D render came back with the silver foil catching the light on the outline and the logo embossed into the paper, and his reaction was just: wow. Same artwork. Completely different product. Three hours in, all three labels were done and the client was happy.
“Every project is different and every client communicates differently. Some people can brief in words, some need to see it and react. Our job is to figure out what gets us to the right answer fastest and be flexible enough to do that. With Ben it was a live design session. With other clients it’s three mood board rounds. With others it’s a five-minute voice note. We’ll always do whatever it takes to get a project where it needs to go.” Palu Malerba, Founder of CreativeWise.
Where it landed.
We delivered the print files the next morning, layered for the printer with the foil, emboss and uncoated Pantones specified. Ben went into production. The bottles land in August.
We are glad this project happened the way it did.
Three weeks of getting it wrong is not something anyone signs up for. But we came out of Tivo working differently than we went in. The workshop is now part of how we start. Not a presentation at the end of the research phase, but a real session where the client sits inside the creative thinking with us: here is what we understood, here is where we are unsure, here is what we think we can take from each of your references, now talk us through it. It has become a signature of the studio. Every project since has been faster and closer on the first round because of it.
