Nikka Museum Renewal

Since opening as a whiskey museum in 1998, the number of visitors has exceeded 600,000, partly due to the airing of the TV drama and the arrival of the highball boom. As the facility has deteriorated and the way the displays are displayed has become outdated, the decision was made to review the entire Yoichi Distillery viewing facility and to renovate the former Whisky Museum as the first phase of the plan.

Yoichi Distillery is an important point of contact where visitors can experience Nikka, and it is also a sacred place for whisky fans. However, the previous viewing facilities were not up to par with its importance, and the fact that they had not kept up with the changes and evolution of the world was a major issue for this renovation.
The main theme of the renovation is to foster understanding and empathy for the Nikka brand by telling a story about founder Masataka Taketsuru's ideal whiskey-making, and about Yoichi as the origin of Nikka, starting from here and moving towards the future.


[Social issues/customer issues/requests]
①The purpose of the renovation is to further improve visitors' understanding and satisfaction, increase the number of Nikka fans, and strengthen the brand.
② As whiskey becomes more popular, displays will be renovated to accommodate the expanding user base and diversifying visitor needs.
3) Re-development of multilingual support in response to the increase in foreign visitors.
4) The main target audience will be customers who are interested in whiskey.
⑤The displays everything from basics such as the manufacturing process to our attention to detail and trivia. However, they are by no means comprehensive and we hope to enable visitors to intuitively understand the main points.
There were more requests than this.


【solution】
In planning and designing this project, we made a major shift in our thinking from the conventional whisky museum, which has been a general and comprehensive place to provide information about whisky, and attempted a completely new approach to displays.
Based on the concept of "Learn about the essence of Nikka Whisky through the brand stories of four Nikka products," we focused on the four representative Nikka brands and turned each brand story into an displays experience. We aimed to create an experience where visitors could learn about the essence of Nikka Whisky and basic knowledge about whiskey while following the brand stories.
displays will include, for the first time, video footage of various people working at the distillery talking to each other and an introduction to the important role of the blender, which will surely be a hit with whisky fans. displays displays will include trivia information for the main target audience, and many displays will reveal the secrets of the manufacturing process that gives shape to the individuality of the product.
Regarding multilingualization, displays explanations are primarily written in Japanese and English, but in order to cater to Chinese visitors, who make up the majority of the museum's visitors, we have introduced digital technology that allows visitors to read translated explanations on their personal mobile phones.


<Our project members>
[Sales/Project Management] Tadayuki Matsubara
[Creative Direction] Tamura Hiroyuki
[concept design direction] Fujie Suzuki
[concept design and Planning] Akira Yamada, Kensaku Shirodo
[Planning] Tomoko Yanagihara, Atsuro Iizuka
[Produced by] Tsukasa Iwasaki, Ikuo Umemoto