BevMo! Brand Guidelines: Beverages & More! of Concord, a Customer Nickname and Gopuff

Two founders and six Bay Area stores.

BevMo! began in January 1994 as Beverages & More!, a company based in Concord, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. English Wikipedia names its founders as Steve Boone and Steve McLaren, and says the company opened six stores in the Bay Area in its first year. The trade site Grocery Dive, writing in November 2020, also gives the founding year as 1994 and the base as Concord.

Growth was not a straight line. English Wikipedia says the company expanded into Nevada and Florida in the late 1990s and closed those stores in 1998, quoting a later executive who said the business had expanded too quickly. After that, it says, management limited growth to California and Arizona and settled on stores of around 7,000 square feet, smaller than the chain’s biggest 12,000-square-foot store.

The short name came next. English Wikipedia says customers were already calling the chain “BevMo” as a nickname; the company registered the bevmo.com domain in August 2000 and, in January 2001, launched a new website and formally adopted the nickname as its brand. A few months earlier, in March 2000, a domain-name dispute over the longer beveragesandmore.com address ended with that address being transferred to the company, a decision English Wikipedia says has since been cited in other cybersquatting cases.

Ownership changed twice. In February 2007 the chain was acquired by the private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners, according to English Wikipedia. On 5 November 2020 the delivery company Gopuff, founded in 2013 and based in Philadelphia, announced an agreement to buy BevMo!; TechCrunch reported that day that the chain then had 161 stores in California, Arizona and Washington and had been owned by TowerBrook. English Wikipedia describes BevMo! as a wholly owned subsidiary of Gopuff.

A cellar master, a house label and a delivery network.

The chain’s store growth is recorded in steps. English Wikipedia says BevMo! opened its 100th store in October 2009, in Torrance, California, when 90 of its stores were in California and 10 in Arizona. By September 2013 it had reached a third state, Washington, with stores in the Seattle–Tacoma area, Vancouver and Bellingham, for 148 stores in all; TechCrunch gave the 161-store figure in 2020.

English Wikipedia also records how the chain described its ideal site in 2009: a store of about 10,000 square feet on a corner, with street frontage and its own parking, run by about 17 employees on average. The Torrance store that marked the hundredth opening was built to that size.

Inside the stores, the range is broad. English Wikipedia gives it as more than 3,000 wines, 1,500 spirits and 1,200 beers, and says most stores hold regular beer and wine tastings in line with state law. Grocery Dive listed beer, wine, hard seltzer, spirits, snacks and mixers, sold in the stores and online with pickup, shipping and delivery options.

A distinctive part of the chain’s voice has been its in-house scoring. English Wikipedia says BevMo! hired Wilfred Wong as cellar master in 1995, when it had six stores. Wong, a San Francisco wine writer and competition judge, was taken on to taste wines for the retailer and score them on a 100-point system he had developed before joining, and he wrote a blog hosted on the company website. English Wikipedia adds that he helped establish Vineyard Partners, an in-house label of wines blended for the retailer, and cites a 2006 New York Times interview in which Wong described the tension of reviewing wines inside a company that sells them, and the company’s view that his scores had to stay independent of its buyers.

Under Gopuff, the stores took on a second job. TechCrunch reported in November 2020 that Gopuff planned to fold some BevMo! stores into its network of micro-fulfilment sites for fast local delivery, without changing the in-store experience. Grocery Dive noted that at the time Gopuff’s website listed no markets in California, so the stores gave the delivery company its way into the state. It added that the deal would let BevMo! customers order everyday items such as pet products, cleaning supplies and food alongside their drinks, for delivery in 30 minutes or less.

Design and documentation.

Wine merchants and alcohol retailers sell a product that shoppers cannot always taste before they pay, so their identities lean on words, place and guidance more than on packaging of their own. A shop name, a fascia and a few lines of handwriting on a card next to a bottle carry much of the work. For a designer, the useful material is what these companies show in public: their shop fronts, shelf cards, tasting areas, catalogues and the corporate pages that explain who founded and who owns them.

The physical shop is the first layer. Some chains began in warehouse-style units where wine was stacked in cases, and later refits moved towards shelving and tasting areas, as Decanter reported of one British chain in 2019. Shelf talkers, the small cards that describe a wine’s style and origin, sit beside the bottles and can be written in a personal, conversational voice. Tasting counters and by-the-glass machines turn part of the shop into a place to try before buying.

Mail-order and online merchants work through a different set of objects: printed catalogues, mixed cases, club mailings and order pages. Their own-label wines, sold under invented names rather than the merchant’s own, are part of the range and are presented much like any producer’s bottle. A founder’s story, such as a first trip to a vineyard or a single van, can be retold in these materials.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founding dates, changes of ownership, parent groups and, for state retailers, the legal basis on which they operate. This guide uses dated, independent sources for those facts and treats the company’s own descriptions as its own words. The palette and type on each page are an unofficial interpretation chosen for the guide, not a copy of any retailer’s signage, labels or logo.

A nickname that became the name.

The brand name is a customer nickname made official. The original trading name, Beverages & More!, already carried an ampersand and an exclamation mark, and English Wikipedia records that in the 2000 domain dispute the company argued that neither mark could be used in a web address, which is why it had sought the spelled-out beveragesandmore.com. When the short form was adopted in January 2001, the exclamation mark stayed, and the company still writes its name as BevMo!.

The other strand of the identity is a named voice inside the stores. A cellar master’s 100-point scores, a blog on the company website and a house label, Vineyard Partners, gave a range of several thousand bottles a consistent point of view, as English Wikipedia describes it.

For a design guide, BevMo! shows how a regional chain turned shorthand used by its own shoppers into its formal name, and how a house critic’s scores and a private label can give a large range a single voice. Compare Total Wine & More, the Maryland-based chain named after a smaller chain it bought, and Costco, the warehouse club. For this guide we use deep blue, signal red and chalk with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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