Grey Goose
Overview
What We Did
The Outcome
Bring three distinct brand identities into one cohesive visual frame — on screen, in motion, at a cultural moment that demanded precision
The ESSENCE Festival of Culture is not a generic brand activation. It’s one of the most significant gatherings of Black culture in the country, and anything that appears on screen there carries that weight. When Grey Goose, Essence Magazine, and Citi Unlimited came together to produce “Toast to Black Fashion” — a video series celebrating summer style with ESSENCE Beauty & Style editor Blake Newby, style influencer Kelà Walker, and spirits influencer Michelle Sprott — the motion graphics had to work across three brand identities without flattening any of them. That’s the problem we were brought in to solve.
Overview
The ESSENCE Festival of Culture is not a generic brand activation. It’s one of the most significant gatherings of Black culture in the country, and anything that appears on screen there carries that weight. When Grey Goose, Essence Magazine, and Citi Unlimited came together to produce “Toast to Black Fashion” — a video series celebrating summer style with ESSENCE Beauty & Style editor Blake Newby, style influencer Kelà Walker, and spirits influencer Michelle Sprott — the motion graphics had to work across three brand identities without flattening any of them. That’s the problem we were brought in to solve.
What We Did
Working with Citi Unlimited as the production partner, we were responsible for the complete motion asset package: title cards, lower thirds, and overlay graphics. Everything on screen that wasn’t the talent or the footage — that was us.
The Outcome
“Toast to Black Fashion” wasn’t a generic sponsored content play. It was a genuine celebration, tied to a specific cultural institution, featuring real voices in the fashion and spirits world. Graphics that didn’t understand that context would have undermined everything else in the frame. We came in knowing what ESSENCE Festival means, knowing what Grey Goose’s visual language demands, and knowing that the motion work had to honor all of it simultaneously. That ability — to read the cultural stakes of a project and design accordingly — is something Therum brings to every collaboration, regardless of category.
Motion design and graphic development for the full video series
Working with Citi Unlimited as the production partner, we were responsible for the complete motion asset package: title cards, lower thirds, and overlay graphics. Everything on screen that wasn’t the talent or the footage — that was us.
Start with the bottle, build to the moment
Grey Goose has one of the most recognizable visual identities in spirits — clean, French, restrained. That aesthetic gave us a foundation: the frosted glass, the elongated proportions, the sense of cool without trying. We used it as a departure point rather than a literal reference, pulling soft gradients and a pastel palette that felt summer-specific and culturally alive without breaking Grey Goose’s premium register.
The challenge with lower thirds and title cards in a multi-brand collaboration is that every element has to serve the video first. Graphics that announce the talent too aggressively, or that feel more brand campaign than editorial, break the tone of what’s on screen. We built a moodboard that mapped the intersection of all three brands — Grey Goose’s elegance, Essence’s cultural authority, Citi Unlimited’s production sensibility — and used that as the visual brief. Every motion decision, from timing to typography to transition, was evaluated against whether it elevated the moment or interrupted it.
A complete motion graphics package for "Toast to Black Fashion"
Title cards, lower thirds for each featured talent, and overlay graphics — all animated in After Effects and designed to move cohesively across the full video series. The package unified the three collaborating brands on screen while keeping the focus where it belonged: on Blake Newby, Kelà Walker, Michelle Sprott, and the celebration they were there to document.
Graphics that served the story without stepping on it
The finished video landed on Essence.com and across the brands’ channels — a clean, summer-forward piece of content that felt worthy of the moment it was documenting. The motion work added rhythm and credibility to the production without announcing itself. Which, for this kind of project, is exactly the right result.
Cultural context is a design constraint, not a decoration
“Toast to Black Fashion” wasn’t a generic sponsored content play. It was a genuine celebration, tied to a specific cultural institution, featuring real voices in the fashion and spirits world. Graphics that didn’t understand that context would have undermined everything else in the frame. We came in knowing what ESSENCE Festival means, knowing what Grey Goose’s visual language demands, and knowing that the motion work had to honor all of it simultaneously. That ability — to read the cultural stakes of a project and design accordingly — is something Therum brings to every collaboration, regardless of category.