The Vodka Aisle Turns Blue With Envy as Ultra-Premium SKYY90 Clearly Ups the Ante

By Ron Romanik

SKYY90 pushes the limits of bottle design to tower over other 750-ml vodka bottles.

Competition in the vodka category is reaching an all-time high — literally. As new super-premium and ultra-premium vodkas ask consumers to pony up $30 or more for a fifth of the clear distillate, the packaging must be equal to the task of commanding the premium price.

Standing a towering 13-7/8" tall, the new 750-ml SKYY90 bottle aims to take the SKYY brand into the stratosphere. Bottle designers were challenged to push the envelope and create a cosmetic-grade glass bottle with extreme dimensions and structural integrity that expressed modern luxury. The glass, imported from Austria, is blown into a three-inch diameter cylinder with a one-inch-thick base and perfectly rounded shoulders.

The SKYY90 bottle shape may suggest to some the movement of a bubble rising up through liquid, as bubbles do during distillation. Bottle decoration is at an absolute minimum, and the elegant, mirror-finish cap tops off the presentation. The cap is a substantial 1.6 oz. (45 grams), which conveys another cue of luxury. The vodka itself, made from the finest amber winter wheat and possibly the purest vodka made, is the culmination of 10 years of development and a $25 million investment into a new distillation facility. The bottle development was undertaken with similar care under the direction of Kim Winter, brand development director at SKYY, and Nicolas Aparicio, executive creative director at Landor Associates, an international branding consultancy. The goal was to leverage the cultural force driving modern premium luxury, communicate the story of the vodka, and secure a permanent place in the vodka category.

Winter and Aparicio set out to create a new space outside the tall, frosted vodka bottles ruling the day. "We really wanted a design to showcase modern luxury," Winter says. "We didn't want to be a Œme-too.'" Winter emphasizes that every detail is precisely executed, like the label that resists scratching. The label is printed with a silkscreen process, and then baked at 600° F for two-plus hours so that the label becomes part of the bottle.

The heavy, one-inch-thick base may help or hinder balance when pouring, depending on your preference, but the base serves another, optical purpose. A second stage of printing lays a water-based, transparent ink layer of cobalt blue on the bottom of the bottle. When light reflects up the cylinder from the base, which happens quite easily, the top fill line glows with the cobalt blue, even when full.

Aparicio believes the bottle and the vodka are mirrors of each other, and the whole experience is one a consumer might not be able to throw away easily. "The bottle almost looked like the product itself," Aparicio says. "It was a structure that told the entire story."

Architectural elegance

Another vodka bottle reaching new heights is Wyborowa (pronounced vee-BROH-vah). Already a well-regarded Polish vodka, Wyborowa introduced their Single Estate super-premium vodka this past winter in a sleek new bottle designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.

Wyborowa Single Estate is created by Wyborowa S.A., a division of Pernod Ricard that currently produces Wodka Wyborowa. Single Estate is a single-rye vodka made from beginning to end by one estate team. The creators of Wyborowa Single Estate grow the rye and craft and distill the product all on one single estate, located in the village of Turew, Poland. The special two-step distillation process, which includes a skillful initial distillation in the estate's small copper columns and an additional triple-distillation in the Wyborowa rectification plant, is employed to create the purest vodka possible.

Jeff Agdern, brand director for Wyborowa Single Estate, said Frank Gehry was enlisted to portray the excellence of the product in the packaging. Frank Gehry is of Polish decent, and two of his masterworks are the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. "Frank Gehry, one of America's greatest living architects, was the only person we considered to design the bottle," Agdern says. "Based on his impressive work, we knew that he could craft a bottle that truly reflected the extraordinary vodka inside."

Gehry's unique crystalline and prismatic expression emulates the artistry that is essential to the creation of this vodka, conveying a fusion of Polish heritage and contemporary sophistication, according to Wyborowa. The dramatic and strong lines and curves promote a smooth and elegant experience.

Academy Award nominees in the acting and directing categories were the first in the world to receive the new Wyborowa Single Estate. Not only did the nominees receive this single-rye vodka months before it was unveiled to the public, they were among a very select group of people to receive a hand-crafted gift case also designed by Frank Gehry. The matching hand-made wooden gift case has similar curves to house Gehry's curvy bottle.

Taller and bluer

Renowned architect Frank Gehry fashioned a distinguished, 13"-tall bottle in his own curvy tradition.

Blue Ice Vodka has updated its package by lifting its profile — literally by two inches — to stand as tall as competitors on the shelf. Flowdesign in Detroit, MI, designed the new 750-ml bottle and label to raise Blue Ice's stature on the shelf. To gain height, Flowdesign suggested a shallower bottle front to back, and the molded icicle back is actually concave. The front of the bottle is perfectly smooth with a gentle convex curve, and additional tapering in down the sides from the shoulders to the base also allowed for more height.

The Blue Ice name is meant to conjure up icicles and glaciers, which really do produce blue ice. Dan Matauch, principal of Flowdesign, thought a layer of transparent blue ink would help the label draw consumers' eyes to the selling points on the label. "You get a clean, cool feeling from the blue," Matauch says, emphasizing the eternal associations of blue with purity, clarity, and ice cool.

Blue Ice Vodka is a premium American potato vodka made at Silver Creek Distillery in Rigby, ID, by Bill Scott, the only master distiller of potato spirits in the U.S. The label makes sure the customer knows this is a U.S. product, with "American" moved to the center of the label, with the introduction of red into the formerly white and blue label, and with thin patriotic stripes on either side of "Vodka." The label also brags of "Four Column Distillation" and "Five Stage Filtration."

Refinements of the Blue Ice bottle allowed it to gain a critical two inches of height, while label changes emphasized U.S. pride.

The circle B icon located near the bottom of the front label has changed from white to red. Encircling the circle B icon is the phrase, "Idaho Russet Potatoes," a major point of differentiation in the vodka market (only 3% of vodka produced worldwide is made from potatoes). In addition, the red circle B icon and the Blue Ice script logo have been added to the capsule, where a revised informational neck hanger is attached explaining the differences between grain and potato vodkas.

Jim Myerson, president of 21st Century Spirits, remarks: "This new package really elevates the impression it will make on the shelf. Although the bottle is still recognizable, the changes further showcase the premium quality Blue Ice Vodka has been producing since its inception."

A welcome drop of Rain

Rain Vodka bucked the ornate decoration trend when its redesigned bottle hit the shelves.

Rain Vodka was originally developed by the Sazerac Company, Inc. of New Orleans as a super-premium vodka made from organic grain and positioned as a "green" product. The brand's original packaging concept reflected that position with recycled paper labels, recycled paper gift boxes, and a stock bottle with a Kerr closure.

The brand's owners decided to reposition the product with a more upscale image, and SPAR, Inc. of New Orleans, redesigned the package from a clean sheet and developed the raindrop shape. Since women are Rain's target demographic, it had to appeal specifically to them in a way the old package did not. SPAR worked closely with Saxco International Inc. of Horsham, PA, worldwide packaging specialists for the wine and spirits industry, to create a whole new image for Rain.

Rain has an intricate and unique, hand-crafted production process that includes seven distillations. To meet the all-important packaging quality requirements, Saxco International sourced and provided private mold 750-ml and one-liter cosmetic-quality flint glass bottles through Vitro in Mexico. The exceptionally clear cosmetic-quality glass was chosen as a statement about the purity of the product inside.

Lane Casteix, general manager and creative director at SPAR, says there were several category tendencies that they were looking to avoid with Rain Vodka. The overall package design was kept minimalist in stark contrast to the overdone, European decorated bottles that were the fashion. "We wanted to do something that fit in the category but set it apart from the others," Casteix says.

Fruit, not the bottle, gives these two vodka blends their pale blue hue.

A compromise was reached to frost only the upper half of the bottle for a chilled appearance and for shelf presence. The lower half was left clear to show the clarity and quality of the product inside. The applied color labeling (ACL) gives the package a higher perceived value, the brand's new logo has a modern appeal, and the matching blue of the cork closure completes the picture. Below the logo is its shimmering silver reflection in reverse.

The package decoration process is very labor intensive in keeping with the hand-crafted nature of the vodka. Label decoration was handled by Quest, LLC of Hillside, NJ. The frosting is spray applied with a feathered bottom edge and fired on. Each color of the screen-printed ACL decoration is hand applied, and fired on individually. The cone shape of the labeling area on bottle presented some application challenges that were difficult to solve. Color registration and imprint distortion were complications that were solved through considerable experimentation.

Saxco sourced and produced a cobalt blue, natural cork closure. The ball component is molded of Surlyn® by Vetro Elite, and the cork shaft was added by Saxco's long-time supplier, J.C. Ribeiro of Portugal. Though the elegant raindrop shape is directed toward the feminine market, acceptance has also been outstanding among male consumers. The new bottle helped double sales the first year, and the brand continues to grow.

Blue elixirs

Last year, Diageo launched Smirnoff Norsk, a new drink blended from a mix of Smirnoff vodka and Nordic berries. The blue vodka targets 18- to 24-year-old male vodka drinkers. The 700-ml bottle by Rockware Glass features embossing and debossing to simulate ice formations.

The new bottle design is based on the recently redesigned Smirnoff Vodka bottle created by Futurebrand as a brand extension to Smirnoff. The bottle profile is identical to the current Smirnoff and the recessed front label is a similar shape but has different overall sizes. This Smirnoff Norsk bottle moves away from some iconographic elements such as shoulder cyrillic text, front lower body crown and ribbon, and a crest on the rear body. The debossed cracks or fissures convey the icy Norsk identity and the idea of "cold energy."

The inspiration to create a vodka blended with berry distillate came from the Nordic tradition of wild berry picking. The new features are critical to the brand image, so Rockware's technical input was needed to maintain their visual impact while ensuring that the integrity of the structure was maintained and the final design matched the Futurebrand concept.

Another interesting bottle is Hpnotiq, whose clear glass reveals a tantalizingly blue elixir inside. Large letters (H, Q, P, N) of different sizes seem haphazardly arranged around a central O. The bottle shape suggests cognac, which is one of the ingredients alongside vodka and a tropical fruit juice blend. How Hpnotiq achieves its beautiful ocean blue color remains a well-guarded secret.