Diversifying the Hospitality Industry with Wine Empowered

Wine Empowered is a tuition-free wine education program founded by professional sommeliers Victoria James, Cynthia Cheng, and Amy Zhou. Their mission is to inspire young professionals and empower women and minorities in the hospitality industry.

To build excitement for the launch of the brand, Barrel built a WordPress site that allows visitors to apply to the program, learn about class details, and make a donation to support Wine Empowered’s mission. We volunteered to be part of this amazing initiative because their mission aligns with our core values as a company.

The non-profit organization’s target audience is young professionals who are always on-the-go, so it was important for the site to be mobile-first. To encourage course sign-up and participation, we designed pages to highlight Wine Empowered’s mission, introduce their team, and share details of the program. We also designed a support page that allows visitors to give to Wine Empowered through donations, sponsorships, and supply.

We designed a set of branded illustrations that complement Wine Empowered’s hand-cut style logomark to build brand recogniton.

“We need to be able to demonstrate to the community that gender and race equity can benefit everyone, that tuition-free wine education can empower individuals to build their careers,” co-founder Victoria James told Forbes. “Once we establish success here, we can then focus on duplicating the program in markets throughout the United States.”

Check out the site here.