For eight years, Collective Arts has been breaking the mold of what it means to be a brewery by producing great craft beers and bringing art to thousands of beer drinkers. What started as a brewery has grown into two tasting rooms, a craft beer and spirits producer, an event space, and a gateway to the world of music and art.
We spoke with Toni Shelton, Director of Marketing and Brand Communications, and Grace Ouellette, General Manager of Toronto Innovation Brewery & Taproom at Collective Arts, to learn more about the brand's history, how they approached their reopening, and the importance of technology in the hospitality industry.
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Collective Arts has such a creative and artistic brand. Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind this concept?
Shelton: Collective Arts is actually going to celebrate its eighth anniversary taiwan contact number this September and was founded by Matt Johnston and Bob Russell, who both came from a beer and design background. They had worked on brands in the past and they had this idea years before they started Collective Arts. The concept was really to bring more art in front of more beer drinkers. How do you inspire beer drinkers while creating great liquid? That's kind of where the concept came from.
How do you engage the entire art community and really build a community in a grassroots effort? And that’s really what they did. When we launched, we were just using bottles and our bottle had 92 different pieces of art. Now, we’ve expanded that program and we’re releasing 250 to 350 pieces of art a year around the world, and that’s just for our beer. We’ve also commissioned art for gin, seltzers, ciders, and our RTD offering.
Ouellette: Even our buildings!
Shelton: Yeah, our building! Art on everything. That’s kind of our internal motto. Our call for art is unique in that anyone in the world can submit a proposal at any time. It’s all done through our online portal and we have a separate panel of curators who select the artists so there’s no bias. In eight years, we’ve featured about 2,000 artists from over 40 countries. We’ve covered six continents. We’ve had times when we were like, “How did this Iranian artist find us?” It really shows how popular it can be.