Your spirit’s bottle carries a huge responsibility: the first impression that many people will have of your brand. Granted, the liquid has to be great to motivate those second, third, 10th, and 20th purchases. But the first one? That’s usually based on packaging.
Yet packaging can be immensely expensive. That puts your typical small distillery in a catch-22 bind: You need effective packaging to make sales, but you can’t afford to custom-design visionary bottles to fulfill their every aesthetic dream and crush the shelf-crowding competition.
“We’re a craft distillery that can’t afford loss-making operations,” says Umberto Luchini, cofounder of Wolf Spirit Distillery in Eugene, Oregon. “The glass itself tends to be the biggest expense in packaging spirit brands, so a proprietary bottle wasn’t an option [for us] from the start.”