V and B Brand Guidelines: The Château-Gontier Cave-and-Bar Chain Built on Franchise

A wall comes down between two shops.

V and B began with two neighbouring businesses. French Wikipedia says that in 1998, in Le Mans, Jean-Pierre Derouet and Emmanuel Bouvet ran a wine bar and a beer shop in the same building; the company’s own version has Derouet running a wine cellar and Bouvet a beer cellar with a bar. The two became friends and decided to put their products under one roof. In the company’s words, a simple idea was born, a wall came down, two shops merged and a name was found.

That name is V and B, written by the company with the word “and” spelled out. French Wikipedia says it comes from “Vins et Bières”, wines and beers, the two trades the founders brought together. The first V and B shop opened in 2001 in Château-Gontier, in the Mayenne département, according to French Wikipedia, the company’s franchise site and the beer news site Bière Actu; the town, now Château-Gontier-sur-Mayenne, is still where the group has its head office.

The format is what the company calls a “cave & bar”: a drinks shop on one side, where bottles are bought to take away, and a bar on the other, where customers can drink on the spot. The company presents it as a place to meet after work, and calls V and B the first cave-and-bar concept in France; that is its own claim. Its staff are described as cavistes, the French word for wine and drinks merchants, who advise on what to buy.

Franchise, from Mayenne to the rest of France.

V and B grew through franchise. Its franchise site, in a page dated 2020, describes the chain as a franchise network that has opened between 20 and 30 shops a year since 2010, with the aim of a V and B in every département of France. French Wikipedia, citing Ouest-France, says the chain had 255 shops in France in 2022, of which 210 were franchised.

The count kept rising. Bière Actu reported in February 2024 that the group had 280 shops and 1,500 staff at the end of 2023. In November 2024 Le Journal des Entreprises reported that V and B would have 288 cave-bars in France and abroad, a handful of them outside France, by the end of that December, after ten openings in 2024 in areas further from its base, including the Hérault, the Gironde, the Marne and Haute-Corse; it said the group expected to pass 300 in 2025, with about fifteen openings planned. The same report said the group also ran twelve late-night bars under a second name, Levrette Café, three of them opened in 2024.

The group has also moved into production. Bière Actu reported that V and B owns 350 hectares of vines and has its own brewery and distillery, Mont Hardi; French Wikipedia says the brewery was founded in 2019 in Château-Gontier, and that the group’s Hugues Laborde business brings together six Bordeaux vineyards. In 2023, Bière Actu said, the group took a stake in Gueule de Joie, a French maker of alcohol-free drinks, and began selling its products in the network. French Wikipedia adds that in 2022 the company opened its own state-recognised apprentice training centre, the V and B Academy, and lists a mail-order business, V and B Connect.

Signs, ranges and owners.

Liquor, beer and wine store chains sell much the same goods, so they rely heavily on what sits around the bottles: the shop sign, the logo, the colours on the fascia and the bags, and the layout inside. The chains in this guide come from Australia, Finland, Canada, France and the Netherlands, and they show how differently that job can be done, from a founder’s portrait on the sign to a set of initials or a plain public-service name.

Store formats vary as much as the signs. At one end are large warehouse-style stores that draw shoppers from a wide area; in 2005 the wine writer Chris Shanahan described Dan Murphy’s stores in Australia as “prairie-like” spaces. At the other are neighbourhood shops beside supermarkets, smaller premium “cellar” stores and, in Australia, drive-through outlets, which BWS said in 2021 numbered 220 in its own fleet.

Ownership shapes the identity too. Some chains in this guide are state or provincial retailers owned by the public sector; others belong, or have belonged, to supermarket groups, as Dan Murphy’s and BWS did under Woolworths before the 2021 listing of Endeavour Group; others again trade as franchises under a shared name. Own-label ranges, tastings, delivery services and loyalty schemes, such as Dan Murphy’s My Dan’s, are part of the brand, and each company names them in its own way.

Most of these chains publish their own histories, on corporate or careers pages that name founders, first shops and owners. This guide uses those pages as the companies’ own accounts, sets them beside independent press and registers where it can, and describes colours and lettering in words; the palettes shown here are an unofficial interpretation, not the companies’ own.

A bell for last orders and a new logo in 2024.

V and B’s most clearly dated design change came in 2024. Bière Actu reported on 6 February 2024 that, 22 years after the chain was born, V and B had changed its logo and graphic identity, with a new visual language the group described as joyful, authentic and warm, a reworked brand language and cheerful colours; the group said in its statement that its many ideas and initiatives deserved to be gathered under a single banner. French Wikipedia also dates the new graphic identity to 2024.

Some signs of the brand are older than the logo. The company says a bell has been the symbol of V and B since its creation: rung once, it calls the last order; rung twice, it tells customers to finish their glass. Its loyalty programme, open in all its shops in mainland France, is built around a community it calls the “VandBistes”, a word it invented. The shops hold themed evenings through the year, the company says, including St Patrick’s Day, Oktoberfest and Beaujolais Nouveau, show sports matches and rent out draught-beer pumps for private events.

The name has also travelled beyond the shops. French Wikipedia says V and B sponsored ocean-racing yachts from 2014, including boats named V and B-Monbana-Mayenne, until a partnership that ended after the 2024–2025 Vendée Globe; it has backed the Laval cycling team since 2017, named Mayenne-V and B-Monbana since 2023; and since 2019 it has run a music festival, the V and B Fest’, held from 2022 at the Domaine de la Maroutière in Château-Gontier, which it bought for the event.

For a design guide, V and B shows how a franchise chain can make a single habit, a bell rung at closing time, part of its identity. Compare Nicolas, the older French wine-shop chain, and Gall & Gall in the Netherlands. For this guide we use a dark slate, a wine red and a hop gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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