We love Christmas. Every year here at Pencil we love to dust off some classic Christmas 45’s. From Bing Crosby, Paul McCartney to Wham we all love the classic Christmas songs that help light the festive spirit inside us all.

This year the annual 45 rummage tradition became the inspiration for our 2023 Christmas Mailer.

At the end of each year we like to send a gift out to our clients to say thanks and wish them a Merry Christmas. Each year it’s a clean slate and open brief of what we can send out. This year we decided that wine would be a nice gift and something we haven’t done yet in the studio; we decided on one bottle of red and one bottle of white. Using the old 45’s as our inspiration lead us to dig through the crates and see what we could use as the creative angle; seeing how each label was designed and the names of the songs etc. It was clear that we could be clever with white wine and red wine and use the sleeve designs of classic records which we ended up deciding on White Christmas by Bing Crosby and Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer by Gene Autry and The Pinafore. Then as if crossed out with a marker pen and re-used for the wines.

We also wanted to invite the recipients to join us on the build up to the big day. We curated a playlist of 45 of our favourite Christmas songs and using a QR code invited people to check it out.

The outer packaging a classic wine wood box had a 7” (classic 45) vinyl laser engraved on and the belly band became the sleeve so as you spend the box the vinyl was being pulled from the sleeve.