Great Umpqua Food Trail

The Great Umpqua Food Trail runs through the Umpqua Valley in Southern Oregon: wineries, breweries, farm-to-table kitchens, and a Hawaiian shave ice stand in Sutherlin. Every stop is an independent business with its own owner, its own look, and its own reason to be on the map.

That is the structural problem with a regional trail. It is marketed as one destination but it is really eighteen small businesses, and a visitor only commits to the drive if the whole thing reads as a single, coherent trip rather than a directory of places that happen to be near each other.

Nobody drives two hours for a list. They drive for a feeling they have already seen.

A trail like this has no advertising budget to speak of and no single brand voice it can enforce across its members. What it does have is its stops, and if those stops are photographed and filmed as if they belong to one place, the trail becomes one place. The look is the strategy.

Build one warm, unhurried visual language and apply it to every stop, so the valley reads as a single destination and each location gives a visitor a reason to make the next one.

Shoot people and hands rather than storefronts. Keep the light natural and the pace slow. Treat a shave ice stand with exactly the same care as an estate winery, because the mix is the point: the trail is more interesting than any one stop on it.

Through Seven Tides, I directed and shot the brand video and built the photography library on location across the valley.

A brand film for the trail and a photo library covering its stops, from Melrose Vineyards and Two Shy Brewing to Steamboat and Wailani Shave Ice, built to carry across the trail's website, its social channels and its printed visitor guides without being reshot for each one.

A trail that looks as good as it tastes. The video and the library give the Umpqua Valley one consistent look wherever it shows up, and give every stop a reason to be the next one.