Chase Design Group Fashions a Unique Bottle Flavor for Voyant, the First Chai Cream Liqueur

The elegant and semi-transparent screen-printed colors of the Voyant bottle took many rounds of trial and error to perfect.

A year-and-a-half ago, entrepreneur Mark Butler and his future partner were imbibing their favorite drink and remarking on their wives’ love of Chai tea, when a thought crossed their minds and lips: “What kind of liquor might go well with Chai tea?” Eager and frequent experimentation led to the rum category, and then to premium four-year-old aged rum.

As the team of four enthusiasts refined the formula to include the aged rum, Chai, milk, honey, black tea, and a panoply of not-too-secret spices, Butler began to take it into cocktail bars for some direct market research. Not happy until he got the “Wow, where can I get more of this now?” response, Butler and partner fiddled with the formula until he indeed got that response repeatedly.

According to Butler, the best way to enjoy Voyant is thoroughly chilled and straight. There is no harsh “bite” to Voyant, as the smooth rum and cream prevent that displeasure. As a result, it is best to avoid the dilution that ice causes. The 750-ml bottle is 25 proof (12.5% alcohol) and retails for about $24.

Cautious not to rush his product into the market without a package to reflect its unique flavors, Butler enlisted the help of Chase Design Group, a Los Angeles creative agency that specializes in brand identities and applications. “For this project, I had to taste it before I did anything else,” explained Margo Chase, executive creative director and founder of Chase Design Group. “The taste was so compelling that we had to develop packaging as distinctive as the flavor.”

Butler, now president of Bacmar International, the makers of Voyant, remembers the initial experience similarly. “It seemed like the taste gave Margo and her team all the ideas that they needed,” Butler recalls, “They got it immediately.” Butler had some experience dealing with liquor distributors, so he knew how important it was to present a complete product and package concept at the same time, and he knew patience was a virtue. Before meeting with Chase, Butler had been toying with the “Voyant” name, and Chase agreed that it had optimistic and exotic overtones.

After a suitable, non-custom bottle shape was discovered in Holland, Chase was keen on devising a color palette that would suggest the richness and spiciness of the unusual liqueur. “In this competitive market, we knew it was essential to generate interest at a glance, to give the worthy product a chance to become an important player in the liqueur market,” says Chase. Since cream was a major ingredient, the bottle had to be opaque.

The bottle, developed in Germany, undergoes a complicated process to achieve the colors that are able to be elicited from the opaque coating of the bottle, to make it rich, fiery, yet with some translucent elements. It was a challenge to make the base opaque coating, which achieves a gradient from the terra cotta red at the bottom to the persimmon orange at the top, as smooth and reflective as possible.

After the base coating is finished, four passes of silk-screen printing with dry-spray organic ink, and baking in between, complete the label layers and colors. Chase recalls the long trial-and-error process to get the colors just right. Butler and Chase were committed to replicating the preliminary design colors they had become emotionally attached to, and were elated when the German printer was finally able to draw all those hues and semi-transparent elements out of the silk-screen process.

In the early days of the 18-year-old firm, Chase Design Group built its reputation by designing hundreds of fonts, logos, and identities for high profile entertainment clients, so the agency is well-versed in creating impact with typography. Senior designer Maria Gaviria designed the custom “Voyant” type and flame/flower “V” to evoke allusions that were warm and spicy. The flame, presented by Gaviria in the first round of ideas, survived several rounds of explorations and is now the understated centerpiece of the bottle.

“The extraordinary design by Chase Design Group has resulted in a fantastic reception in the initial weeks of the launch,” comments David Cook, sales manager at Bacmar. “In fact, we are enjoying the benefits of buzz marketing, with calls coming in from around the US and abroad,” Cook continues.

Butler likes to think of a consumer’s experience with the bottle the opposite and complement to his experience while watching Chase Design create his bottle. As the bottle “completed” the taste in his mind, he hopes the taste now “completes” the bottle, which is the often consumer’s first contact with the product.

At times, Butler grew weary of the refinement, “At what point do you say: ‘This is it…we’ve got it’?” But in the end, Butler is glad that he and Margo Chase did not take any shortcuts, and is overjoyed with the overwhelming initial response the bottle and product are enjoying as integral partners. “This just stresses the importance of packaging,” Butler says.