Brand Activation

Aperol Spritz Activation

An Aperol Spritz bar built under a tent at Pebble Beach Food & Wine. I worked on the team that designed and built it, on the ambience, the brand messaging and the physical setup.

Event: Pebble Beach Food & Wine
Role: Part of the design and build team
Contribution: Ambience and set styling, brand messaging, on-site build, design support
Scope: Bar environment, props and planting, tablescape
Note: Aperol's own brand assets; the activation was designed around them

Make the flavor visible

A food and wine festival is a tent full of booths competing for attention, and guests decide from about thirty feet away. So the bar grew beneath live kumquat trees, fruit still on the branches, set in coral crates at eye level along the top of the counter.

Citrus does three jobs at once here. It says bitter orange before anyone reads a word, it smells like the drink, and it lifts a flat tented space with height and shade. The ambience was my main focus, so much of my day went into placing the planting and greenery and layering it until the trees read as a true canopy overhead.

I shaped the brand messaging too, which at an activation means choosing the fewest, clearest words. Everything a guest needed to know about the drink was already in the room: the fruit, the color, the glass in someone else's hand. The words simply give it a name.

The whole set in one look. Wave-printed facade, live citrus along the top, trunks doing the work of a barrier. Thirty feet away, you already know what's being poured.

Trunks, crates, and a wall that fizzes

The facade is printed with a wavy two-tone stripe that keeps moving across the whole run of the bar. It reads as fizz, and it turns a long flat surface into something alive.

In front of it, white steamer trunks with orange banding and hardware, stacked two high. They're the hardest-working objects on the set. They hold stock, guide people away from the service side, give the photographs a foreground, and carry the Italian aperitivo-travel idea all on their own. The crates play the same trick at a smaller size and double as planters.

I was on the build for this, putting the set together and placing it. Every tent has its own personality, so plenty gets decided standing inside it: what sits in front of what, and the angle the whole scene has to sing from.

Two white steamer trunks with orange stripes, buckles and corner hardware, stacked in front of the wave-striped bar wall, with a coral crate planted with a kumquat tree above them. — **Props that earn their place.** Storage, barrier, foreground and brand cue, all from one object, with the crate above repeating the idea at a smaller size.

Styling the part people photograph

The tablescape is the part that ends up on everyone's phone, so it was styled as a set. Coral surface, the bottle and the prosecco in an Aperol ice bucket, loose kumquats and cut foliage, tinted sunglasses and a straw boater with an orange band.

Nearly everything on it is the drink, an ingredient, or something a guest could pick up and wear. Holding to those three keeps the table feeling alive and inviting.

A coral table styled with a bottle of Aperol and prosecco in an orange ice bucket, loose kumquats and cut greenery, orange-tinted sunglasses and a straw boater hat with an orange band behind. — **Drink, ingredient, or wearable.** Nearly everything on the surface is one of the three. Real fruit and real foliage, because the camera can tell.