Gallo Family Vineyards Celebrates Family with Online Crest Creator

California winery Gallo Family Vineyards has launched the Gallo Family Vineyards Crest Creator. The microsite enables fans to create, share and download personalized crests for all of their families, “whether they include the people you’re related to, or simply the people that you relate to in life,” Gallo says.

To make a crest, fans choose a template and then add text and images, including creatures, food and drinks, fashion, hobbies, nature, “odds ‘n ends,” sports, travel and spiritual.

According to Gallo, the site includes 17 crest templates and 300 icons, offering what it calls “a seemingly unending way to make your family official.”

What’s more, through a partnership with online retailer Zazzle.com, the custom crests can be printed on a variety of objects, Gallo says.

Gallo calls itself “the winery for all your families,” and says it conducted a survey to learn more about families. In it, they found that Americans have on average three “found” families, or people unconnected by blood or marriage, and that 94 percent of pet owners consider pets to be part of the family, too.

On Facebook, Gallo says family can include “blood relatives, best girlfriends, your co-workers, the guys you hunt with, the girls you hunt for shoes with, your book club, bridge club, [or] any club.”

Gallo encourages fans to commemorate these families with a crest and the symbols that unite them.

“This evolving definition of family, now popularized by hit television shows and supported by real-life stories, was the inspiration behind its Crest Creator website,” Gallo says.

A Gallo rep was not available for comment by deadline.

“We designed the Crest Creator to be something fun that pays homage to families, however they’re defined,” said Stephanie Gallo, vice president of marketing, in a prepared statement. “It’s our way of saying thanks and celebrating all the families who have invited us to the table for the past eighty years.”

Gallo has 1,900 Twitter followers and 284,000 Facebook likes.

In addition, on September 26, the winery says it launched a multimedia ad campaign reflective of the very active cultural conversation afoot around the changing definition of family.

The campaign features seven groups the brand says “colorfully demonstrate what it means to be a family today.” That includes: a polar bear club, a rodeo family, a work family of hairdressers, a music family of ukulele players, a sports family of tailgaters, a sports family of bowlers and a team of competitive bridge players.

The ad campaign was created by advertising agency BBDO San Francisco.