Agency: Front Page
Designer: Lisa Henderson, Laura Service, Andrew Nicolson
Copywriter: Emma Fraser
Project Type: Produced, Commercial Work
Client: Rum Blender
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Packaging Contents: Rum
Packaging Materials: Engraved glass decanters, Wood-topped cork stoppers, black cable string, coloured paper printed with black ink

The challenge was to create a limited edition rum collection that told the story of Rum Blender (a recently launched website allowing people to create their own blend of rum – rumblender.nl). It all kicked off by a group from Front Page sitting around a table and learning all about rum; how it’s made, the different types, what Rum Blender is, and of course, a flight of seven different rum samples to taste, enjoy and scribble tasting notes for. By the end of the session they’d created three unique blends to take forward and design custom engraved labels for.

Seven months later designs were completed and sent away for engraving. The finished creative represents the journey that this rum takes – from where it’s made to where it’s blended to where it’s bottled – in three simple, stylised illustrations. The first characterising a sun-soaked Caribbean island (West Indies), the second showing the narrow building fronts along the canals of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and the final one depicting Bothwell Castle (Scotland). These illustrations were all built on a single uniforming grid that was developed to ensure that – although three different designers were working on each individually – they would all work together and share the same style and weight.

What’s Unique?
The Rum Blender bottle is both interesting and unique offering an exciting canvas to design any style of label for, but we couldn’t resist making the label entirely engraved (by way of sandblasting). By studying the angles, contours and curves of the bottle we created prototype templates and tested them using paper cutouts and acetates. What’s also unique is that the bottles come as a three-piece, each one a different style of rum both in appearance as well as taste, to tell the story of the brand. Each of the three label illustrations were cropped into circular icons and printed on additional information tags fixed to the bottles necks. This packaging is so great we made a microsite for them.