Crystal Head Vodka

Paint Your Pride

In 2022, I led the redesign of Crystal Head Vodka’s Pride bottle, which launched in 2023. The brand was looking to boost sales by generating excitement and a sense of exclusivity through a limited edition strategy, which was executed through new packaging as the bottles are popular collector’s items.

Client: Crystal Head Vodka
Studio: In-house
Role: Design lead, art direction, copywriting, photography, videography, production management
Project Date: 2022-2023

Marketing Collateral

new copy goes here

Printed rice paper cocktail topper / Table tent

Retail display bin for US markets / Pop-up banner

Product sell sheet and info sheet about LGBTQ+ organizations Crystal Head has partnered with

Copywriting

Photography

new copy goes here

The Process

Ideation

Work on a new redesign began after Crystal Head had run with a rainbow bottle for 3 years, and wanted to stand out by taking a more creative approach than the commonly-seen rainbow stripes.

The marketing team and I each presented several concepts for the new glass. After the first round of ideation, I produced quick mockups of the strongest ideas to better illustrate how we envisioned them on the bottle. We worked with different internal teams to narrow down which ideas we would elaborate on, based on market feedback about what concepts were expected to be received favourably.

Our ideas were further refined when early manufacturer samples were produced, and we found that some did not evoke the correct theme. For example, we rejected our first iteration upon finding that it reminded people of 1960s psychedelia more than LGBTQ+ Pride.

Prototypes

Crystal Head’s brand tagline is “Vodka for the Creative Spirit,” and the team saw this as a great opportunity to play it up with an overtly art-themed bottle design. A paint-splash concept I had proposed was selected to proceed to the next stage.

An opaque white was chosen for the bottle’s base coating (satisfying my critique of the earlier bottle, whose semi-transparent colours tended to get muddy when placed against anything but a clear, light background). I also viewed this as an opportunity to propose a design that included the Progress Pride flag’s additional colours, representing trans and BIPOC communities.

The next step was to work with the glass manufacturer to figure out our possibilities and limitations in the decoration process. Due to the complexity of the bottle itself, some of the designs did not translate well when forced to adapt to the bottle's irregular contours.

A susceptibility to severe print distortion on the dome of the skull, along with detail loss and blurring in the deeper crevasses, caused us to rethink our approach to this design. At this point, I was asked to scrap the linear drips and try a splatter pattern to make it easier to design around the areas where achieving satisfactory print quality would prove difficult.

The final iteration of the artwork took its inspiration from dynamism of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the visual texture of spray paint (as an homage to the brand’s iconoclastic spirit and collaborations with graffiti artists).

Credits

Marketing: Kristina Cappellini, Daniella Vizzari & Anita Marinho
Photography/Videography Assistant: Anita Marinho
Manufacturing: Marilou Boully & Stéphane Stanton-Brand
Mixology/Recipe Development: Andrew Daw & Billy Cavallo