Laithwaites Brand Guidelines: Bordeaux Direct, a 1969 Van and the Sunday Times Wine Club

A van, a cooperative and a mailing list.

Laithwaites began in 1969 as Bordeaux Direct, founded by Tony Laithwaite. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on the parent company Direct Wines, says Laithwaite had spent student summers near Bordeaux while reading geography at Durham University, lodging with Jean Cassin, manager of the wine cooperative at Lussac Saint-Émilion. He began by bringing bottles back for family and friends, and took the name Bordeaux Direct from French road signs. His opening mailing went to about 100 names copied from a telephone book and produced two sales, the entry says; word of mouth and door-to-door selling followed.

The early business ran on a van. Local producers, Laithwaite and his grandmother put money in, and the van made the trips to France and back with wine bought outright, according to the same entry. Speaking to GetReading in July 2004, Laithwaite recalled driving from Reading to Bordeaux every month, and said the company had been based in Caversham for 20 years before its move to Theale. He also said that Barbara, later his wife, joined the business two years after it began. The directory entry adds that by 1972 there was a shop under a railway arch in Windsor, and that Barbara ran the business side while her husband sourced the wines.

The turning point came in 1973. After The Sunday Times published an exposé of fraud in the British wine trade, Laithwaite wrote to the paper about buying wine direct from French estates. The reader offer that followed brought orders for more than 3,000 cases, and the two sides set up the Sunday Times Wine Club, the directory says. Clubs for other partners followed, and the group was placed under a holding company, Direct Wines Ltd. In his 2004 interview Laithwaite said the family had started planting its own vineyards in Bordeaux in 1979, with the first harvest in 1985.

From Bordeaux Direct to Laithwaites.

Direct selling shaped the brand. The directory entry describes some 14 catalogues a year and a call centre at the company’s headquarters, with websites added from the late 1990s. In 2000 the retail business dropped the Bordeaux Direct name for Laithwaites, because it had long since stopped concentrating on Bordeaux and was importing wines, including its own house brands, from around the world. In 2003 it bought the Australian Wine Club from Foster’s, and in 2005 it took a controlling stake in the online merchant Virgin Wines, the directory says.

Own labels were a defining part of the list. Writing in The Observer in October 2009, when the business turned 40, Tim Atkin described its practice of selling wines under its own labels, which made direct comparison with other merchants hard, and reported that a new global wine director, Dan Snook, was moving the range upmarket with a more transparent approach. English Wikipedia adds that Barbara Laithwaite established the Wyfold vineyard in South Oxfordshire in 2003, with a first commercial vintage in 2006, and that in 2011 the company worked with the Royal Estate to plant a vineyard in Windsor Great Park.

The look of the brand changed in 2021. PRINT magazine reported in May 2021 that the Manchester agency LOVE had designed a new identity built on block-printed type, iconography, handwriting and illustrations recalling well-travelled wine cases and early sketches by the founder. The logomark was redrawn in bold capitals, with new brand colours and without the apostrophe, the magazine said, and the new tone of voice drew on interviews with the Laithwaite family.

Shops, shelves and catalogues.

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 family-owned direct seller.

The business remains in family hands. Marketing Week described it in November 2024 as a family-owned company that began by selling through the post and has largely moved online. The magazine reported that its marketing team tested brand advertising on ITV regional television, comparing pairs of regions in the north and then the south of England, with the agencies Adam&EveStudios and Medialab Group, and noted that Laithwaites works with smaller, family-run wineries rather than stocking the wines shoppers see in supermarkets. It also pointed out that the old model of catalogues and phone orders had always made sales easy to trace back to a mailing.

In September 2025 Laithwaites wines became available for on-demand delivery for the first time, through a partnership with Deliveroo covering London, Bristol, Manchester, Brighton and Cambridge, Harpers reported; the selection included The Black Stump and Château La Clarière, which the magazine called the founder’s passion project. The list runs to around 1,500 wines from 22 countries, Harpers said. In December 2025 the same magazine reported that Direct Wines, the family-owned parent of Laithwaites and the Sunday Times Wine Club, had named Philippa Strub group chief executive, succeeding David Gates; she joined in 2012 and became UK managing director in 2018. The group sells direct to consumers in the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand, with franchises in other markets, according to that report, and Tony Laithwaite is still involved in the business.

For a design guide, Laithwaites shows how a mail-order merchant built its identity around a founder’s story, printed catalogues and its own labels, and later redrew it with hand-made type and illustration. Compare the shop-based Majestic and the online Naked Wines. For this guide we use vineyard green, Bordeaux red and parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Laithwaites’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.