Pickers Vodka

Bringing the spirit of music city to Pickers Vodka packaging.

With the craft distillery market exploding, Pennington Distilling Company decided that their “Pickers” vodka brand needed a way to stand out from competitors in an increasingly crowded field. After a series of disappointing experiences with a packaging supplier claiming to have in-house design expertise, Pennington turned to Studio One Eleven to develop a truly unique packaging experience.

Pickers’ outgoing package was a stock bottle and closure that offered limited potential for real differentiation on-premise or on-shelf. In sharing their vision for a new package, Pennington challenged us to synthesize Pickers’ musical, cultural and regional themes into a new brand experience celebrating the distillery's Nashville roots. Importantly, Pennington also asked that our new package have minimal impact on existing filling, decorating, capping and pack-out operations.

After performing a category audit of Pickers’ competitive set and in-market field research on Nashville’s heritage, music, and bar culture* we crafted a bottle that establishes clear connections to Pickers’ roots. Bartenders and shoppers alike first notice that the sides of the bottle are embossed with a guitar fretboard spanning from bottom to top. Near the neck of the bottle, a guitar pick-shaped embossment captures the iconic three stars of the Tennessee flag’s Grand Divisions. Both fretboard and the pick elements represented significant technical challenges, but we worked closely with Berlin Packaging’s Supply Chain and Custom Tooling divisions to insure that our vision was faithfully executed in glass. From initial concept sketches to refinement and engineering, Pennington's and Berlin’s product development teams remained fully aligned via our use of the latest 3D visualization and rapid prototyping tools.

The results speak for themselves: An impactful packaging experience that will propel the Pickers brand to even greater successes quickly brought to market via our turnkey suite of design, engineering, sourcing and logistics. Cheers to that!

*Yes… We’re fully committed to immersing ourselves in our work.