Read this case study over on our site for a more immersive experience — larger photos, more links and context.

We recorded a fun podcast with Austin from CMC. Listen to that here.


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Hi, there.

The work we share here on BBT usually focuses on brand strategy, positioning, identity and package design — the public-facing work that’s fun to look at and easy to discuss.

But building a successful beverage brand requires two equally critical parts: A strong foundation (the stuff we just mentioned) and relentless execution. You need both the strategic vision and the daily grind of getting your product into accounts, onto shelves and into people’s hands.

What does that execution look like?

Driving your product into new accounts. Securing PODs. Organizing tastings and events. Managing field activation, marketing, co-branding, and distribution logistics. Vetting the right wholesaler(s). Navigating key chain placements. Executing do-or-die national expansions — all the unglamorous work that actually moves cases.

That’s where Countermeasures comes in.

Founded by Austin Sawyer and Seth King in 2020 and based in Franklin, Tennessee, Countermeasures provides shared sales reps, retail activation and strategic support for scaling beverage brands — a modern alternative to building your own sales force or hiring traditional brokers. They've built a national network serving more than 150 clients, helping brands like Poppi, Cann, Montucky Cold Snacks, Ritual Zero Proof, Blake's Hard Cider, Garage Beer, Bero and Deschutes turn strong brand foundations into real-world traction.

We’ve been fans of their work for years and have sent more than a few of our own clients their way. So when Austin reached out about CMC’s own brand, we were thrilled to return the favor.

Because just like many of the brands they help scale, Countermeasures had outgrown its early look and needed an identity that matched its reach, energy and sophistication.

Today, we’re taking you behind the scenes of their recent brand refresh — how we helped evolve CMC to reflect what it’s become and where it’s heading next.

(Above): Countermeasures' original logo and deck.

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Background context and CMC’s challenges 

Countermeasures (CMC) came to CODO with challenges we see often: They’d grown faster than their identity.

In just a few years, they’d expanded from a scrappy startup into a national organization with 150+ partners and one of the most seasoned teams in beverage. But their brand identity hadn’t kept pace.

Internally, their team admitted that if you asked fifteen people what CMC does, you’d get fifteen different answers. Externally, their website and sales deck — their “most important assets” — felt dated, wordy and too small for the caliber of work they’re fielding today.

In other words, they looked smaller than they were.

The root causes were familiar: They’d never gone through formal positioning or brand strategy. They built the plane in the air. And they grew so quickly that pausing long enough to realign felt impossible — especially as their business and services continued evolving at a breakneck pace.

CMC needed a system that could clearly tell their story, inspire confidence from enterprise-level partners and set them up for the next five years of growth.

Strategic approach

Our goal was to help Countermeasures articulate what they’ve always done instinctively and define the through line connecting their services into one clear story.

An important part of this: CMC isn’t a sales agency. They’re a growth partner. A team of deeply connected beverage veterans who know how to navigate wholesalers, chain buyers and retail floors better than anyone in the business.

Their work spans shared sales reps, retail marketing and activation, expansion strategy, national account management, spirits and NA specialization plus fractional CMO support — everything a scaling beverage brand needs to turn planning into traction.

And that’s what made this project interesting: There isn’t another group in the industry doing exactly what they do. Defining that position — putting language and structure around something so unique — became the heart of the entire process.

Together, we worked to:

– Simplify their story around a single organizing idea: Countermeasures is the future of beverage

– Refine their messaging to emphasize speed, expertise, transparency and partnership

– Differentiate them from “consultants” and “brokers” (curse words at CMC) by positioning their team as embedded allies with skin in the game

– Balance confidence and humility: professional but approachable, direct but self-aware

– Create space for the brand to scale from beer and spirits into emerging THC, functional and alternative categories

The result is a strategy that makes CMC’s offering immediately clear to craft founders and enterprise partners alike — distilling years of hard-earned experience into a simple promise:

They help beverage brands grow smarter, faster and further than they could on their own.

And this is more than just rhetoric — CMC’s shared team structure makes that promise tangible. Their sales reps are embedded across multiple brands, giving clients the horsepower of a full-scale sales team without the overhead. It’s a smarter, more flexible model that scales with you — not ahead of you.

Brand Essence Development 

With these strategic anchors in place, we then rolled into how to tell this story visually.

We developed three distinct Brand Essences — The Future of Beverage, Serving in Excellence and Your Unfair Advantage — each representing a different way of expressing these ideas.

The Future of Beverage leaned into CMC's forward-thinking ethos: Confident, composed and grounded in experience. The partner rewriting a 150-year-old industry playbook for how brands grow.

Serving in Excellence emphasized reliability and professionalism. The idea that growth comes from experience, discipline and continual improvement — not flash or luck.

Your Unfair Advantage captured the contagious energy that defines CMC's culture: Candid, fast-moving, unafraid to say what others won't and powered by the drive to win alongside their partners.

(Above): Initial Brand Essences and mood boards — an exercise in putting a name to an idea. What’s the most compelling thing about CMC? What are partners really buying when they work with CMC and how does that help them grow? And finally, what does that idea look like?

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After plenty of spirited discussion, we landed on The Future of Beverage as their defining creative direction. You can see photos below, but here’s a look at the narrative we shared with their team:

Growing a beverage brand has never been more challenging — and the old playbook no longer cuts it. The world has changed, and so must the way we build brands. 

Today’s market demands trailblazers — leaders who know that investing in sales and retail support is more essential than ever, yet recognize that the traditional model is broken. Why risk critical spend — overhead, capital, time — building your own sales force, when you can tap into an unmatched network of veteran retail expertise at a fraction of the cost? 

Enter Countermeasures: Built for today’s market — not yesterday’s model. 

We deliver innovative, à la carte scaling strategies paired with consistent, transparent analytics — whether you’re launching a new brand, entering a make-or-break growth phase, or optimizing an established national portfolio. Together, we turn your vision into practical, measurable growth. 

We bring every capability to bear in service of building your brand. Our partners call it the “CMC Effect” — a force multiplier that transforms goals into real results. Whether you’re breaking into new regions, chasing key PODs, or rethinking your entire go-to-market strategy, CounterMeasures is your unfair advantage. 

This is the future of beverage — and we’re leading the charge. 

(Above): Countermeasures' final Brand Essence. Once we got this squared away, we were clear to begin working on their identity revamp. 

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Building CMC’s Brand Identity 

With strategy locked, we turned to CMC’s visual identity — the first tangible expression of their new story.

When we first met, CMC’s entire identity consisted of a single mark (and as an aside, it didn’t actually spell their name out — so, we fixed that). And beyond a limited color palette, there wasn’t much to build on. Their identity made them look small compared to the business they’d built. 

So we developed a proper identity system from the ground up — one that could flex across decks, digital, events and merch while maintaining instant recognizability.

Logo & iconography

We started by building a true primary logo: Clear, confident typography anchored by a mark that now communicates their full name. From there, we expanded the system with alternate lockups, supporting icons and a family of secondary marks for use across internal materials, trade shows and apparel.

Voice & representation

From the start, we wanted this identity to reflect the actual people who make CMC what it is. Their team includes dozens of women in leadership roles — a rarity in beverage — and their perspective shaped both tone and visual language. The resulting identity avoids the overly-macho tropes that often dominate the category. Instead, it conveys authority through clarity, not volume. 

(Above): Snapshots of the three identity directions we initially shared. 

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Tagline system

We developed a flexible tagline suite, giving CMC ways to express its personality across formats:

– Built for today’s market — not yesterday’s model

– The future of beverage

– Our people are your people. 

– Counter the problem. Measure the impact. 

Each works as a standalone message, or together, as a shorthand for CMC’s broader positioning.

Supporting visuals

A custom icon set, geometric illustrations, and modular graphic devices bring cohesion across channels — all designed to be scalable, legible and easy for CMC's team to deploy.

(Above): CMC's Modular Identity System

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Reimagining CMC’s sales deck 

Countermeasures' deck is mission-critical to their business development. In one early stakeholder conversation, someone called it "not just a sales tool — it is the brand."

A little dramatic, maybe — but not wrong.

This is what every prospective partner sees first. It’s how CMC explains who they are, what they do and how they help brands grow. It’s also what their team uses daily to guide conversations with partners, distributors and retailers. 

The original deck was bursting with information but lacked hierarchy and visual polish. And because CMC is in a class by themselves, we needed to clarify not just what they do, but how they do it and why it works.

NDAs added another layer of complexity. Much of CMC's best work can't be shared publicly, so we had to refine and simplify without losing the depth that makes them credible.

We broke the project into weekly sprints — starting with title and service overviews, then detail pages and finally the case study sections that bring their work to life.

The final deck is sleek, intuitive and alive with momentum. The kind of asset that makes a cold outreach feel like a conversation between peers. It tells CMC's story with clarity and pride while giving their team the flexibility to tailor each presentation to any audience.

We can't share the whole thing here, but if you want to see it, reach out to CMC.

CMC’s Website 

Before we wrap, a quick note on how CODO approaches website design: We encourage our partners to think of their site as a tool that works 24/7 — a focused, living asset built to drive a specific action.

In CMC's case, that action is simple: Reach out to start a conversation.

With that goal in mind, we treated their site as an extension of the deck — fast, minimal, and purpose-driven. Each page provides just enough context to build credibility while maintaining momentum toward connection.

Visually, the site carries the new identity forward with bold typography, confident color blocking and smart use of white space. It's clean, direct and optimized to show results while staying focused on next steps.

Nothing extra, nothing wasted.

Wrapping up 

We wrapped this project just in time for CMC's debut at the NBWA trade show, complete with a new booth showcasing their refreshed identity. Tight timeline, high stakes, zero margin for error — but our teams crushed it.

Seeing their new identity live at this scale was incredibly satisfying. (Shoutout to Austin, Seth, Abbey, Sam and Alden — we had a great time working with you all.)

As a quick aside: CODO primarily helps B2C brands scale, but we're always struck by how lifeless most B2B branding in beverage still is. When you're selling to other businesses, it's easy to default to safe and sterile. But personality and clarity aren't mutually exclusive — they're what make strong B2B brands stand out.

This project reinforces that building a brand is only half the job. The follow-through — the day-to-day grind of showing up, selling and activating — is where your brand actually takes shape.

If you're reading this, you're likely a beverage founder, designer, marketer or salesperson. Here are a few lessons from our work with Countermeasures:

– Great strategy and design are table stakes. You build your brand with follow-through.

– Simplicity scales. The clearer your message, the easier it is to grow.

– Execution is identity. Every rep visit, display and deck reinforces what your brand stands for.

The best brand work doesn't end at launch — it's proven in the field.

And in case I haven't made it clear: Reach out to them. I don't say this lightly — CMC is a cheat code for growing your beverage brand.

If you're ready to grow, start at choosecmc.com