Brand Curious

Collective Arts

Building a beverage brand around an idea the
global art community could participate in.

Building a beverage brand around an idea the global art community could participate in.

Collective Arts

Building a beverage brand around an idea people could participate in.

The Challenge

When Collective Arts was founded in 2013, craft beer was already crowded with excellent breweries making excellent beer.

Quality was essential, but it wasn't enough to create a distinctive brand. We needed to give people another reason to choose us, an idea that could connect the business with something they already cared about.

That idea was creativity.

The Idea

The Idea

Before the first beer was brewed, Collective Arts invited emerging artists from around the world to submit their work.

YOUR ART HERE.

Their art became part of the packaging. Artists were credited and paid, and their stories became part of the brand. The product became an expression of the idea and gave people a way to participate in it.

The Community

What began as a call for art grew into a global creative platform.

Artists brought their work, audiences and communities into the Collective Arts story. The brand wasn't trying to manufacture a community around beer. It found a meaningful role within an existing creative community and gave people a reason to participate.

The Numbers

No.1

Craft beverage brand in Ontario

15

Countries

240K+

Social Media Followers

38 K+

Artist submissions from 65 countries

2K+

Artists published and paid

$1.25M+


Paid directly to emerging artists

The Results

Collective Arts demonstrated something that continues to inform Russell Strategy today.

A great product matters. But when a business finds an idea that is authentic to the organization and meaningful to a community, that idea can create preference, participation and differentiation that competitors find much harder to reproduce.

The idea doesn't sit beside the business as a marketing message. It helps guide the products, culture, communication and decisions the business makes.

Brand strategy becomes business strategy.

They can copy what you make.

It is much harder to copy what you stand for.

Collective Arts studio photo with spray paint cans and a Collective Arts can
Collective Arts Daily Forecast floral can design
Collective Arts Call For Art campaign poster with Good Monster can
Lineup of eight Collective Arts can designs

OutThere Brewing

Building a brand from the idea up.
Capturing the rituals of outdoor culture.

Collective Arts

Building a beverage brand around an idea people could participate in.

Patrick Hendry

The Observation

OutThere Brewing began with an opportunity.
Non-alcoholic beer was growing quickly, but much of the category was still defined by the product itself — beer without alcohol.
We started somewhere else.

The Idea

The Idea

People don't build relationships with products simply because of what they contain.

They connect around interests, beliefs, experiences and the communities they are part of.

Outdoor recreation already had all of those things — a deeply connected culture built around shared experiences and a love of being outside.

That led to a different question:

What if we built an NA beer brand around outdoor culture rather than non-alcoholic beer?

One Idea.
One Connected Brand.

OutThere. A beer brand built for people who would rather be outside.
The name gave us both a place and an attitude.

From there came a simple framework:

Recreation. Celebration. Conservation.

Three ideas that define what the brand believes, how it behaves and the community it wants to be part of.

The strategy gave us a filter for every decision that followed.
Rather than creating a collection of marketing assets, everything was built to express the same central idea.

The result is a complete, market-ready brand built from the ground up.Its commercial story is still to be written.But the thinking behind OutThere demonstrates something fundamental to Russell Strategy:

Start with the idea. Build everything from it.

Where are you starting?

You have a brand with more potential.

If the business has outgrown the brand, or the brand simply isn't doing what it could, we can help you rethink it, reconnect the pieces and accelerate what comes next.

You have an idea.

If the business has outgrown the brand, or the brand simply isn't doing what it could, we can help you rethink it, reconnect the pieces and accelerate what comes next.

Consider investing or partnering with OutThere Brewing?

We don't just advise brands. We build them too.
OutThere is our latest. A market-ready non-alcoholic beer brand built around outdoor culture.

If you'd like to learn more about OutThere, including investment or partnership opportunities, let's talk.

Start a Conversation.

Book a call here or email bob@russellstrategy.com

Curiosity
is Innovation

Bob Russell

Founder

bob@russellstrategy.com

© 2026 Russell Strategy  
All images courtesy of Collective Arts Limited  
© 2026 Collective Arts Limited
www.collectiveartscreativity.com