Brief

Engine Gin tasked Wilde Toast with developing a global on-trade toolkit to define how the brand should show up in bars, clubs and night-time venues across international markets.

The challenge was to move Engine beyond a product on the bar and into something people notice, choose and want to be seen with. In a crowded category where most brands compete for visibility through volume, Engine needed a fundamentally different approach, one that built cultural presence through consistent, well-placed experiences rather than single-moment activations.

Key objectives:

1. Define a clear on-trade strategy rooted in Engine’s brand attitude and audience behaviour
2. Develop an activation framework that could be adapted across global markets
3. Create a toolkit giving market teams everything needed to build presence through the night
4. Establish Engine as a brand that shapes the kind of nights people want to be part of

Delivery

Wilde Toast developed an end-to-end on-trade playbook built around a single organising idea: building scenes, not moments.

Rather than chasing attention through big set-piece activations, the strategy was built on repetition and cultural fit showing up consistently in spaces that already held relevance, and adding to the experience without dominating it. Three core experience principles underpinned everything: be unconventional, be participatory, be real.

The toolkit gave market teams a modular activation system — spanning venue presence, engagement and experience, designed to build familiarity over time. Each element was developed to work independently or in combination, creating a sense of Engine appearing across different nights and different spaces in ways that felt connected but never identical.

The result was a strategic and executional framework that could travel globally while retaining the brand’s edge at a local level.

If you need support with strategy or toolkit development, give us a shout: hello@wildetoast.co.uk