Spirits · Concept · One label
Offshore Gin
— a label aged on the seabed
The challenge
The brief came with a claim: Big Cayman Spirits ages this gin in a chest on the sea floor. True or a tall tale, I couldn't say — I've never been to the Cayman Islands to check. But it was too good an image to leave in the small print.
And the name carries it. Offshore — out at sea, where the chest sits; and offshore in the other sense too, the one the Caymans are famous for. So the label had one job: don't draw a gin. Draw where it's been.
The face
The whole thing hangs on one engraving: a chest, sitting on the sea floor under two leaning palms, a gull, a headland behind. Not a pirate cartoon — a fine cross-hatched scene in the old travel-poster hand, the kind you'd find printed on a vintage steamer ticket. It reads as heritage, and it shows the product's real resting place at the same time.
Then the label earns its keep as an object. OFFSHORE runs across the middle in tall drawn letters, gold foil tracing every edge over a wave-pattern guilloché. GIN sits in a foil-blocked red panel. A single pink conch, engraved and embossed with little ripple rings around it, is the one warm note in an otherwise cool sea palette — teal, navy, cream, gold. Foil, emboss, deboss, fine-line print: a label built to be picked up and turned in the light, not just read on a shelf.
Shot as if just lifted from the water — wet glass, a barnacled chest, salted rope, shells and beach stones — so the bottle and its story arrive together. One label, one claim, carried all the way from the name to the foil.
The result
A prototype. The engraving, the label and the print treatment — foil, emboss, deboss, fine line — were designed and specified, and agreed with the client. The bottle never went to press: we did not land on the same picture of the brand.
Kept in the portfolio because the drawing stands without the bottle behind it. Everything shown here is a presentation, not a shelf.
Want one of these
for your own range?
Tell me what you're making and what comes after it. I'll tell you which chapter it is — and if it isn't a fit, I'll say so.