Studio Announcement | Awards | Brand Identity

Dreamjar completes its hat-trick at India’s Best Design Awards 2020.

Dreamjar StudiosOfficial Communications

January 7, 2020

Everything has been online for a while now.
Work-from-home is the norm. Award nights mean screens instead of stages.
That evening, we were glued to ours.

Just a group call, a shared screen, and all of us waiting together as results rolled in. Somewhere between refreshing links and half-finished conversations, Dewey Station Wines picked up India’s Best Design Award 2020 for Brand Identity Design at the India’s Best Design Awards, our third win there. It felt strange and grounding at the same time. Winning from our desks. Together, but apart.

This year’s event carried a theme that felt hard to ignore: Fightback. A reminder of long-term thinking, short-term resilience, and the role design plays when everything feels uncertain. Less about inspiration, more about responsibility. One moment that stayed with us was when the community paused to remember Vikas Satwalekar. A name many of us had grown up seeing, hearing, and learning from. The kind of legacy that doesn’t need explaining.

What we poured into this one.

Dewey Station Wines has always been about a few simple things. Good humour, good times and serious wines. The kind meant to be shared. Wine that feels personal, and bottles made for tables with food, friends, and conversations that linger. We shaped all of that into an identity that felt unmistakably theirs. We built around the stories already there. Subtle nods to trains. Labels that felt friendly but thoughtful. Colours that carried fun and celebration. An identity that could move comfortably across their range, from the playful Train Series to the more refined Anne-Inspired wines, without losing its personality.

Some of the nicest ideas lived in the details. Like a bottle holder concept designed as a keepsake, machined in oakwood and shaped to echo the logo itself. The kind of object that stays on the table long after the wine is gone, quietly becoming part of the ritual. The bottle holder became one of those ideas that carried more weight than we expected. Part concept, part object, part memory. A way for the brand to stay present even after the last glass is poured.

The idea was spearheaded by Maannik Singh, who led the thinking behind turning a simple object into something people would keep around long after the wine was gone. As he put it:

"When you look at most wine on a shelf, the label and the bottle shape are usually the only things doing the talking. We wanted to add something completely new to that conversation. Something unique, something that could work across bottles, and something that felt special without being hard to access. We ended up making a one of a kind wine coozie shaped like a train engine. It came together as a two part piece, and from the start we had to be very intentional about how it would actually be made. It needed to be manufacturable, scalable, and able to fit the many different shapes and sizes wine bottles come in.

At first we explored doing this in full color, but it quickly felt like too much. Instead, we leaned into real, raw, natural textures that contrasted the vibrant colors of the label. Wood and metal gave us the contrast we were looking for without competing with the bottle itself. The final form became a CNC-millable shape carved from a single block of wood, paired with metallic accents, and split into two clean, functional parts.

This was a totally new kind of project and honestly, a lot of fun to build. In the end, it frames the bottles as a limited edition gift, and as something that earns its place on a shelf with its footprint and baroque design."