The Blufftop At Rocheport

The team at The Blufftop began an ambitious rebrand. The challenge was simple to describe, but perhaps difficult to execute: how could they pull three wine brands, two restaurants, a store, and three rental properties into a cohesive parent brand? The goal was to create a larger brand that would offer both flexibility to grow without confusing or disengaging stalwart fans.

Les Bourgeois Vineyards created a new brand bible organizing three wine brands, two restaurants, a store, and three rental properties into a cohesive parent brand: The Blufftop at Rocheport. Determining how the brand should work was only part of the challenge, however. Seafoam’s challenge was to implement the new Blufftop at Rocheport brand in order to make the entire organization more profitable.

Implementing a new brand, while folding a beloved existing brand takes a lot of planning and nuance. Creating visual cues and utilizing the previous name (strategically) is vital to ensuring the user feels guided through their journey; rather than simply being dumped into a new brand.

This is especially important for a brand that is so tied to experience and memories. Countless college students, their families, and brides, have fond memories of Les Bourgeois Winery. Rather than excluding these users, we worked to pull them into the new brand creating excitement for the user to return to The Blufftop and create new memories.

Putting this branding into action was going to require a new website as well as a revamp of all of the digital properties. It was at this point in the journey that Seafom stepped in. This wasn’t as simple as a “reskin” of an existing site. The Blufftop at Rocheport envisioned a new, robust tool that would help elevate all of the new features of the brand. The new website also needed to include opportunities for online shopping, event planning, reservations for overnight stays, and a rewards program.

Seafoam Media tackled this challenge by fully immersing the team into the new brand. We toured the facility, integrated ourselves into the team, and got to work.

By showing the connection between the child brands as an essential part of our messaging and information architecture, we could help the Les Bourgeois Vineyards team make more money from large transactions, like renting a cabin or booking a wedding, and we could gain them more cross-sells by encouraging people to buy more than one experience when on property.

We created a website that would allow the user to quickly see the full scope of services provided by the brand; pulling them deeper into the site and encouraging them to book a stay or buy a case of wine!

Large events, especially weddings, are a big part of the goals set by the team at The Blufftop at Rocheport; weddings can involve booking multiple venues, overnight stays, large catering orders, lots of wine, and are one of the best ways to create customers for life. The key takeaway being that weddings can be very involved and conveying the expertise in such events, and in such a holistic manner, can be a challenge. With their old website, The Blufftop did not have a good way to generate wedding leads at all. Following the new site launch, the Blufftop was flooded with requests for wedding bookings, receiving many more per month.

Meanwhile, Seafoam helped The Blufftop to capture queries for both the past and current branding so that previous customers and new customers had a seamless experience. The new Blufftop website serves more often than the old website for the Les Bourgeois Vineyards Branding and generates 55% more traffic for the old branding than the past website, as well as being the top-ranking site for the new branding.

Selling wine online is challenging as most consumers have gone back to purchasing in person. However, The Blufftop has been able to almost double the total organic sessions to the site from queries about wine with the new website. New wine product pages show more detailed information and make it easy to find and enjoy the wine in stores.