Effen

That’s Effen for Effen Vodka, which in Dutch means: 1) smooth, 2) even, 3) balanced and cleverly is “a five letter word.” It certainly is but there’s a story to go with it.

I will start here with giving them high credit for their branding, which is some of the best I’ve seen. I love the clean, sleek look of their design and the play on words. I even like Effen vodka and it’s now our “house” brand. Kettle One still takes the cake for straight flavor taste — if you like vodka.

Since I’m running behind this week, the lounge music on their site, btw, is the music for Kick-Starting your weekend. Play it in the background while you preview their site.

This will be as short and as sweet as I can. It’s true, you never know who’s reading your blog or if anyone is really, but you’re hoping they are and as I was pleasantly surprised to find out, they do.

Way back in January a PR company contacted me via email to discuss the possibility of me being their art agent for event for their high profile client and for me to contact them if I was interested. Good thing I was checking my email that day and I decided not to delete it as spam. I emailed back and consequently went on to have delightful, sometimes humorous  banter back and forth with one of the top agents. We seemed to click. It wasn’t a gag. They had seen posts and photos on my site that they liked and thought that I would be a good person to research and locate artists in these four cities: Las Vegas, Denver, Milwaukee and Chicago, where the Art of Design Events would be occurring for their client, Effen Vodka. Well, the name spoke to me and I agreed but I would need help. I enlisted my savvy sister Lindsey (also business partner) to help with Denver and LA and I would take Milwaukee and Chicago. We drew up the necessary paper work and it was a go. There were 6 events, 2 different occasions in LA, Denver and Milwaukee, in which different artists would need to be secured for each event. The stipulation started with finding fashion oriented artists but then this narrowed the field significantly so it was expanded. Our job was to vet the artists once they were found and then pass their info onto Limegreen, the PR company. Since the company was located in Chicago, they took this city off our list. It was down to 3 cities 6 events and I think we did a great job. I have to give Lindsey most of the credit; even though I helped with all of the city searches, Milwaukee was off the table, so she found most of the artists in the end.

I hope the results of the artists creations will be featured here on Effen’s labels and on their Art of Design. They should for all the work they did.

Lindsey found the best candidates in LA and in Denver. We passed these contacts along and one was even asked to do a gallery show after the event.

Milwaukee wasn’t so easy. Although, I found some great artists as you can see in these previous posts and with Brooke Duckart’s post recently; there were several complications, however, primarily with the meager budget Effen had to spend and could not supply one of the artists with about 500+ labels. Since the objective would have been for the artists to start and complete one of their pieces on site, I’m sure her artwork would have been spectacular, however, my artists didn’t seem to fit the Effen billing and this was complicated by the company spontaneously rescheduling or canceling events, which didn’t make it easy in all of our efforts to secure artists, who take work when they can and have to schedule in advance. Together, Lindsey and I found over 25 artists, some like Mark Marrara, in Milwaukee, who’s work I find fascinating, but after responding once, never got back to me — that was another downside and a lost opportunity.

We found some great artists for them and the events helped to even springboard their profiles, as I’ll continue to do here. Being an artist, I like to support other artists when I can. I was honored to be asked to help in this effort and it was a wonderful opportunity and now I can truly say, “who knew” that  this would come as a result of the blogosphere. I guess I better keep on blogging….. 😉