Stella Rosa is the #1 imported wine in America — a semi-sweet, semi-sparkling Italian wine made with natural ingredients and a beloved product line spanning over 70 flavors. Their core consumer has always been older multicultural women who've made Stella Rosa a staple for every occasion, big or small. That loyalty built an empire.
But Stella Rosa had a challenge: their flagship best sellers were icons to a loyal base, yet largely invisible to a younger generation discovering wine through TikTok, Instagram Reels, and creator culture. The brand needed to show up where a new demographic was paying attention — without alienating the consumers who made them number one.
Flavor Group was brought in to build a year-round influencer and social content strategy with a clear mandate:
1. Attract a younger demographic to Stella Rosa's flagship products. Expand beyond the brand's core audience by establishing a meaningful presence on TikTok and Instagram through culturally relevant creator partnerships and platform-native content.
2. Develop a distinct social media identity. Create a recognizable point of view and content style for Stella Rosa across platforms — one that felt modern and entertaining while honoring the brand's celebratory DNA.
3. Diversify the content approach. Build a content ecosystem spanning influencer partnerships, in-house produced comedic short-form content, and creator-driven pieces across multiple interest categories — cocktail culture, comedy, lifestyle, and seasonal moments — so the brand could reach different audiences without ever feeling repetitive.
Stella Rosa's flagship flavors didn't need reinvention — they needed reintroduction. Flavor Group's strategy was to take products that had already earned loyalty with a core demographic and make them culturally visible to a new, younger audience by meeting them inside the content formats, trends, and creator voices they were already engaging with every day.
Diversified Content Across Interest Categories
Rather than building a single content playbook, we diversified across multiple interest verticals — each one a different door into the Stella Rosa brand. Comedy, cocktail recipes, lifestyle alignment, and cultural relevance all played distinct roles in the strategy, ensuring that no matter what a potential consumer cared about, there was a piece of Stella Rosa content that felt made for them.
We created a holiday cocktail recipe timed perfectly for party-hosting season that exploded to 1.96M views, 1.3M reach, and 162K engagements — including 56K shares and 30K saves — a staggering 12.5% engagement rate against reach on a single post, with save-and-share ratios that turn one piece of content into a recurring reference point audiences return to and pass along. We tapped into seasonal moments, positioning Stella Rosa as the perfect Mother's Day gift through a partnership with @parkspartyplanning that generated 3M views and 18K engagements. And we aligned with culturally resonant moments, like the growing stay-in economy and at-home date nights, partnering with @lexijohnson for content that captured 1.3M views and a remarkable 75K engagements — a ratio that signals deep audience connection, not just passive viewership.
In-House Comedic Short-Form Content
Beyond influencer partnerships, Flavor Group produced original skit-style comedic content designed to give Stella Rosa a distinctive, ownable voice on social. This wasn't filler between influencer posts — it became one of the campaign's highest-performing content pillars. One skit-style ad alone has amassed 4M views, 56K likes, 1K comments, and 562 shares, averaging roughly 100 comments per week in sustained engagement — well above every other ad in the brand's portfolio. The comedy-driven approach proved that a wine brand could be genuinely funny on social media without undermining its premium positioning.
TikTok Creative Center Recognition
The quality of the creative work earned external validation at the platform level. Two of our ads were featured in TikTok's Creative Center — the platform's public showcase that spotlights the best-performing ads in each category. TikTok only highlights ads that perform well above average in engagement, watch-through rate, and conversion behavior, making this recognition a meaningful benchmark for creative excellence in the Alcoholic Beverages category.
The Strategic Balancing Act
Throughout it all, the underlying challenge remained tonal: content had to feel fresh and platform-native enough to stop a 25-year-old mid-scroll while still resonating with the loyal consumer who already had Stella Rosa in her cart. We solved this through sheer variety — comedic skits, polished recipe content, trend-driven formats, and authentic creator storytelling each served different slices of the audience, but together built a cohesive brand presence that felt vibrant, relevant, and unmistakably Stella Rosa.
Flavor Group's year-round strategy proved that Stella Rosa's flagship products could break through to a new generation without losing the audience that built the brand.
Across influencer partnerships, in-house produced content, and creator-driven pieces, the full campaign delivered:
The influencer program alone accounted for 20M+ views, 11M+ reach, and 875K+ engagements — but in-house produced content like our skit-style comedy series contributed an additional 21M+ views and 325K+ engagements, validating the strategy of building a diversified content ecosystem rather than relying on influencer partnerships alone.
The campaign achieved approximately a 6.7% engagement rate against total reach — dramatically outperforming the typical 1–3% benchmark for alcohol brands on social media. And 170K link clicks demonstrate this wasn't passive viewership — audiences were actively moving from content to cart.
The work earned platform-level recognition with two ads featured in TikTok's Creative Center — the platform's showcase of top-performing creative in the Alcoholic Beverages category.
Stella Rosa came to Flavor Group as the #1 imported wine in America with a fiercely loyal base. We made sure the next generation of wine drinkers understood why — one scroll-stopping piece of content at a time.
