andstudio’s Wine Design Exchange eschews fees, RFPs and email chains in favour of a week spent living alongside winemakers. Here’s what other studios can learn from it.
Every studio owner knows the drill. Draft the deck, chase the brief, wait for the procurement team to get back to you. It’s slow, it’s expensive to pitch for, and, more often than not, the client you actually want never sees your name.
Lithuanian studio andstudio has decided to skip that whole process entirely, at least for one corner of its business. Its new initiative, Wine Design Exchange, asks nothing more of clients than a plane ticket, a spare bed and a few decent dinners; the studio’s fee, essentially, is the trip, the table and the wine that comes with it.
The premise is simple. Once a year, andstudio will pick a winery anywhere in the world, move in for a week, work the harvest, sit through the tastings and get to know the people behind the label. From that immersion comes a full rebrand: strategy, positioning, identity, packaging, the lot. There’s no agency fee; the winery covers travel, accommodation and meals, and that’s it.
It sounds almost naive in an industry built on retainers and scope creep, but there’s a sharper commercial logic underneath it. Family-owned wineries are struggling: younger drinkers are consuming less, the market’s fragmenting and, according to andstudio’s own research, 85% of consumers choose a bottle based on the label alone.
If that statistic is even roughly true, most independent wineries are losing the argument before anyone’s tasted a drop. andstudio has spotted a genuine business problem and built a business development model to solve it at the same time.
Free work isn’t really free
The obvious question is why a studio that’s just topped the 2025 ADCE Design Firm rankings would give away its most valuable service for little more than a flight, a bed and a full table. The answer, according to partner and creative director Augustinas Paukštė, is trust. “We know the chances of an Italian winery discovering a branding studio from Lithuania are pretty small,” he says. “We wanted to remove that barrier completely and create an offer that feels irresistible.”
That’s a polite way of describing what’s, in fact, a very deliberate piece of marketing. andstudio isn’t giving anything away; it’s investing in access. A week embedded with a winemaker generates a case study no cold pitch could match, a relationship that’s stickier than a standard client contract and a story that mainstream press will actually cover, this article being a case in point.
The wineries get a rebrand; andstudio gets raw material for its own reputation, plus, presumably, some very good meals and bottles to take home. Neither side is being naive here, and there’s a lesson in that for any studio wondering how to get in front of clients who’d otherwise never return an email.
How they got the idea
The idea traces back to a pre-pandemic studio exchange in Florence, when andstudio’s team spent a month working alongside an Italian design studio and spent many evenings in wine bars, long dinners, and on terraces. “That was the first time we experienced wine through the people who make and drink it every day,” Augustinas recalls. “The conversations felt incredibly familiar. People spoke about wine with the same passion we speak about design.”
It’s a useful reminder that some of the best commercial ideas come from noticing an unrelated industry that shares your studio’s values rather than from a strategy workshop. Winemaking and design have more in common than they might first appear: both are craft-led, both live or die on storytelling, and both suffer when the people doing the making are too close to explain what makes their work distinctive.
Augustinas puts it bluntly: “Many wineries are incredibly innovative in the vineyard and cellar but surprisingly conservative when it comes to communication. There’s still a belief that great wine sells itself. We think great wine deserves a great story too.”
By the way, andstudio isn’t chasing the most photogenic château or the biggest export numbers. Wineries are chosen on the strength of their story, the challenges they’re up against, their appetite for change, and their willingness to be truly collaborative, rather than just handing over a brief and disappearing. Location, size and existing brand maturity don’t factor in.
Key takeaways
I reckon there are two main takeaways here. First, that immersion produces better briefs than briefing documents ever will. A week spent among the vines, and around the table, will surface positioning insights no stakeholder interview could match, and that’s as true for a fintech client as it is for a family vineyard.
Second, that reciprocity matters. andstudio isn’t working for free out of charity. Instead, it’s trading its own time and travel costs for unrestricted creative access and a story it controls. That’s a currency arguably worth more than a modest project fee.
It’d be easy to dismiss Wine Design Exchange as an elaborate junket, all long lunches and Instagrammable shots. But Augustinas is keen to head that off.
“This isn’t a creative stunt or a working holiday,” he insists. “It’s simply our way of doing the work properly.” Given the studio’s pedigree and the seriousness of the brief (a four- to six-month process covering strategy, positioning and a practical implementation roadmap), I believe that claim holds up. The wine, the meals and the travel are the perk, not the point.
Whether other studios could pull off the same model depends on nerve and cash flow: it only works if you can absorb months of unpaid strategic work in exchange for a case study and a relationship.
But the underlying idea—that the best way to win difficult, sceptical clients is to turn up, do the unglamorous work alongside them and let the relationship do the selling—is one worth stealing regardless of your sector… or your tolerance for long lunches.
