Wharf Distillery is a craft gin brand with strong B2B credentials in the distillery trade, but little consumer-facing visibility among gin enthusiasts. Terrier Agency ran a two-month micro-influencer campaign, beginning in December 2020, to put Wharf gin in the glasses of genuine craft spirits lovers.
Creators were recruited in waves, selected for the quality of their gin and spirits content and, crucially, authentic audience engagement rather than follower count. The campaign generated 145 pieces of shared content, and although 90% of the influencers had never heard of Wharf Distillery before the campaign, many kept its gin in their drinks cabinets after it ended.
The programme moved Wharf from near-zero consumer visibility to an active presence within engaged UK gin communities, earning genuine loyalty rather than one-off trial.
Why Alcohol Content Needs a Compliance Pass
A craft spirit selling to consumers for the first time can’t just hand product to anyone with an audience. Every creator has to be checked for an age-appropriate following and every piece of content reviewed against platform alcohol policy before it goes live, on top of the usual audience-fit vetting Terrier applies to any category. Recruiting in waves rather than all at once, as Wharf’s campaign did, is standard practice for spirits: it lets a smaller distillery test what resonates with the first batch of creators before committing the rest of the two-month run to it.
Reading “90% New to the Brand” as the Real Result
145 pieces of shared content is a distribution figure, how much genuine reach the campaign put behind Wharf gin, not a sales number. What matters more for a brand moving from B2B obscurity to consumer shelves is the 90% figure already on the page: nine in ten of the creators who took part had never heard of Wharf before the campaign, which is a direct measure of how far the brand travelled beyond its existing trade relationships in two months, not a number Terrier is claiming credit for beyond what the page already states.
