When we kicked off the process of developing a craft distillery in Kommetjie, we wanted to pay tribute to the beautiful place in which we live.
We were pretty sure that Deep South would be the name of the distillery, but we needed a logo. So we went global. For the brand development and logos, we ran a competition on a crowd-design website, where we invited designers from around the world to submit their concepts for a brand that would be a little different, a little fun, and that would link somehow to the Deep South.
We got 150 designs and submissions in a week and it was hard work to go through them all. We picked 10 favourites and circulated the designs to a sample audience with one important question: “Which of these designs would entice you into buying a bottle, just because of the logo?”
More than two thirds of respondents said “Pick the Penguin! Pick the Penguin!”.
And so we did.
We are not sure what gender our penguin is (and it is notoriously difficult to sex a penguin anyway so we are quite pleased we don’t know the answer to that).
And it does not have a name yet. There may be a competition in there somewhere to ask our fans and followers to help us complete his/her identity. Some day!
But why is the penguin upside down?
One of the quirky things about us is that our penguin is upside-down. We asked our winning designer, a young Ukrainian woman, for her motivation.
Her reasoning was that if you live in the Deep South in the southern hemisphere, then your penguins are going to be hanging upside down, on the bottom of the world! If there were penguins at the North pole, they would of course be upright!
We often invite visitors to give us their own reasons for the inversion of our penguin, and we must say, their reasons are quite a lot more colourful than the real reason.
Incidentally, our penguin is an African Penguin, once known as a Jackass Penguin because of its braying call that sounds like a donkey in distress! These penguins are found only on the Western Cape and are endangered. An inverted penguin is sometimes used as a symbol of the penguins endangered status.
The nearby colony at Boulders Beach in Simonstown is a popular tourist attraction and so the choice of an African Penguin is a fitting choice for a logo for a craft distillery in the Deep South.