Solidarité Grands Froids offers shelter, food and clothes to the homeless in Brussels. The worst period of the year for the 5000 homeless people are the cold winter months. The briefing was to boost donations to be able to handle the surge in demands for help. A difficult task for any charity in the Christmas period. The 5000 homeless of Brussels are a mix of refugees waiting for a visa, unemployed people evicted from their homes and people who can't benefit from the social security system. As it's a scattered and complicated problem, so there is no easy way to help. We wanted to remind people of the issue and make helping extremely easy and almost impossible to refuse. As in the pre-Christmas period, restaurants are very busy, created a connection through the stomach, straight to the heart, with a wine label for the homeless: Vin Maison, or House Wine.

Like the cry for help homeless people write on cardboard, we applied the same style to design the label. Only this time, the cry for help was delivered to people’s table. Not to make them feel guilty, but as a reminder of the parallel lives that exist in our society.

Additionally, the unexpected scruffy look of the label is an excellent conversation starter. Where the label usually leads to knowledgeable discussions about vintage wines and exceptional years, this scruffy looking label leads to a more societal debate. And if we know humans, there’s also a sense of pride and show of generosity for the one who serves it.

Material:

The "Vin Maison" label is made of the sturdy cardboard, an unfortunate cliché for homeless people as they live in it, shelter under it, write their messages on it.

Typography:

The writing is done in a slightly clumsy way, to look like the kind of cries for help we see next to homeless people on the street. With this typography, it becomes a cry for help on the restaurant table.

The effect is all the bigger, as wine labels are usually the medium to convey the sophistication of the wine, with premium design elements and information of origin. This particular one is so antinomic in the world of wine, that it sparks a very different kind of conversation. One about solidarity, with a very different aftertaste.

In the participating Brussels bars and restaurants our Vin Maison immediately became a hot selling menu item.

And on the e-commerce site our selection of white, red and bubbly Vin Maison was a popular end of year gift item.

Combined the sales resulted in a 300% uplift in contributions to the Solidarité Grands Froids non profit organisation compared to last year.

And although the problem is far from solved, as a result it was a slightly warmer Christmas period for a lot of the homeless people in Brussels.