If you’re building a distillery, launching a new brand, or taking an NPD concept to market, you quickly learn this: design is rarely delivered by one supplier.
It’s also rarely just one packaging job.
It’s bottle choice, closure, secondary packaging, website, photography, point of sale, and the asset system that holds it together.
The work is rarely linear either. Briefs overlap. Decisions evolve. Some days it feels collaborative. Other days it feels like chaos.
The most useful way to think about this is as an ecosystem. The partners you choose need to work together, not in isolation. And someone has to hold the centre and connect it all. Often, that’s you.
This guide is here to help you understand the process and make better choices early. Part pep talk, part map of what lies ahead, part practical “how to”. It’s what most teams need before they start briefing.
Before we dig in, a reminder: spirits aren’t sold by design alone. And they don’t survive on looks. Above all, you need consistency.
The liquid, the vision, and the values need to be defined alongside the look and feel. If the bottle looks one way, the story sounds another, and the liquid delivers a third, the brand will start to feel vague and ultimately falter.
You want people to understand what you stand for quickly, then have that promise reinforced in the glass and across every touchpoint.
Two supplier models that work for new-to-world launches
There are two common ways to run a new-to-world brand build. Neither is ‘better’. The first is simpler to manage, the second is often far more cost-effective.
Pathway 1: One lead agency that owns the whole system
This is the single creative partner route. You work with an agency that can carry the load end-to-end. They may bring in specialists, but often they have the capability in-house.
The tasks they cover might include brand strategy, naming, identity, packaging design, digital assets (website), launch and broader campaign thinking.
You tend to pay more for having that capability under one roof.
That said, in return you get coherence, clear project management, and fewer moving parts to have to dovetail into one another.
The one lead agency approach suits founders who are stretched by the operational build, liquid development, and the day-to-day work of getting to launch.
Based on my experience seeing these projects develop, while the upside is coherence, the risk is ownership.
If most of the thinking is outsourced, clients can end up with something beautiful that doesn’t fully feel like “theirs”, and that makes it harder to evolve the brand once the initial project ends.
If budget doesn’t allow for the same team to remain involved after launch, some founders then struggle to take the work forward at the same standard. If they haven’t built the instinct for what’s intrinsically right for the brand, what follows are many mis-steps at the point of execution.
The other risk is having perfect concepts in principle, but devoid of any personality. Big agencies don’t always take bold creative risks. Their global clients often don’t need them in the same way a challenger brand does. Especially if they are not drinks specialists.
How to avoid the pitfalls?
Make sure they are reflecting your vision by starting off with a strong concept before you talk to them. Articulate your point of difference and let them develop it it. Good agencies shape identities, hone positioning and articulate that through great design work. But if you want something authentic and differentiated, you need to provide the spark from which that fire grows.
Secondly, ensure you brief in a campaign that can start 6 months in. That helps partners think about how the brand will come to life and allow you to take the next step after launch. It allows you to discuss how you see the brand living in the market and how it shows up, not just being born. It also sets budget expectations around what brand refinement and evolution based on market contact looks like.
Pathway 2: You build the vision, set the direction, then bring in specialist partners
This route is modular by design. You do more of the early thinking yourself, then brief in the right specialists for the job.
This might involve briefing in a packaging designer for glass and closures, a brand identity studio, photography, digital content creators, and marketing support.
You become the glue between them, keeping decisions aligned and maintaining momentum.
It can be far more cost effective, and it often suits founders with a clear point of view who want to stay very hands-on. If you have relevant skill sets, it allows you to take full ownership of certain areas and do it yourself.
And if you can’t be that omnipresent force driving the project, an NPD consultant can step in to translate, sequence, and keep the ecosystem working as one.
While the upside is control and cost, the risk is cohesion. When you’re the creative lead, you need to stay objective. You must become strategist, creative lead and project manager, with enough foresight to integrate work and keep decisions aligned across partners.
If you’re learning on the job, it’s easy to get pulled in different directions and for the outcome to feel disjointed even though it’s entirely “your baby”.
It’s easy to run out of cash. More so to leave items underdeveloped as they sat beyond the initial ‘remit’ you scoped out for someone, or were unforeseen at the time you began…
How to avoid the pitfalls?
Set yourself up for success by mapping it out the brand from start to finish. Use toolkits to map creative strategy and route to market. Reduce the unknowns early by doing the research.
Be open about the modular approach with partners.
Help them understand the big picture and where they fit in. Often, suppliers will let you know what they are worried about and what they need to happen upstream before they can do their part to the best of their ability.
Two design disciplines to treat separately
Whichever pathway you choose, NPD in the drinks world means you’re still overlapping two distinct skillsets.
You have structural packaging design (3D, production-led, industrial design work) to deal with for the bottle and label. Then there is also softer brand identity, comms and graphics work (visual system, digital, personality and tone).
Here’s what each involves.
Caveat: This assumes that liquid development is done in-house and that marketing and sales kick in at a later point (either in house, or via different providers).
Structural design and packaging engineering
Think product design. Bottle form, closure interface, embossing, glass weight, label panel geometry, secondary packaging mechanics, and manufacturability.
Suppliers and designers who work in these fields think 3D, and are often aware of in mould costs, minimums, tolerances, lead times, and what can physically be produced.
It’s relatively straight forward if it’s a case of simply applying labels. However, complexity increases dramatically once you go direct onto bottle and deal with decorators, or if you start to customise the glass itself.
If you’re considering bespoke glass, experience matters more than most people expect.
Good bottle design isn’t just a nice silhouette. It’s the detail: weight and balance, punt depth, wall thickness, closure compatibility, fill levels, vacuity, label geometry, how decoration behaves on curved surfaces, and whether the bottle will run smoothly on a bottling line. It also means understanding bottling line realities and timelines.
Those constraints aren’t always obvious at the start, but they show up later and compound.
Because of that, being a strong product designer (or design agency) doesn’t automatically mean being strong at delivering bespoke bottle design. If you’re going down the custom route, you’ll often save time and cost by working with someone who has done it before and has links to a glass supplier.
Alternatively, bringing in a specialist consultant who can sanity-check decisions and connect you to the right glass and closure partners.
A simple due diligence step is to look at who a designer has worked with, and how those relationships are structured.
Brand identity, digital world and graphics
This side of the design process revolves around the identity system. Brand architecture, typography, label hierarchy, tone of voice, colour systems, and how a range holds together across SKUs.
These partners should be strong at creating recognisable assets that scale across touchpoints. Think websites and content templates. Consider campaign systems, tone of voice and launch comms.
Brand identity teams are brilliant at visual systems. But drinks is specialist, and not everyone understands the category dynamics. Not everyone lives inside the drinks world or understands bar culture.
They don’t always think in serve strategy, occasion, category specific price-point cues, or what helps a bar team sell it. They’re often viewing the brand through a consumer and visual lens, which is useful, but it can miss the commercial dynamics behind spirits.
That’s why it often pays to complement identity work with strong drinks knowledge. Someone who understands channel strategy, serve strategy, and the realities of B2B sales and who can act as a commercial guardian. Designers will always work hard to make something look good, but if the message doesn’t support sell-in and repeat purchase, it won’t deliver.
They keep decisions anchored in how the brand will be listed, sold, served, and talked about. You can be that person. But if you’re not confident in doing that, bring in help.
Summary so far: two routes, two disciplines.
There are agencies that can deliver the multidisciplinary work needed to go from inception to launch. This tends to come with budget implications.
Almost no individual can offer a true 360 service and so, a modular approach involves assembling a team. Someone must tie it together.
Meanwhile, there are two major areas to think about, loosely split into 3D and brand world.
What matters is being clear about what you’re buying, and not pushing a brand strategist into packaging engineering, or expecting a structural designer to hone your tone of voice.
Expect it to feel messy at the start
Early-stage brand building rarely happens in a neat sequence. You’ll often be shaping the concept, defining the liquid, and exploring design directions at the same time.
That’s normal. The trick is not to go too far down one path before the others can catch up.
Use lead times to your advantage and select what you need to prioritise first. Glass development, closures, print finishes, and minimum order quantities can all put constraints on the creative sequencing.
In practice, you move in loops. In practice, you work in loops: concept, early design, reality check, refine. Some elements go through multiple rounds, others stay stable. The goal is to reduce the moving parts until it all locks together.
If you want a simple way to get yourself up to speed before you start briefing agencies, my Creative Strategy and Brand Planning resource covers a lot of this early thinking. It helps you define the vision, values and concept, connect it to the liquid, and ask the right questions before you spend money on design.
The point of it is to feel informed and empowered, so you can either do the work yourself, or give partners clear direction and get better work back faster. By working with the toolkit, you’ll be able to map the NPD process out and build a far more coherent brand.
A note on the importance of designing for modularity
It can be tempting to think you can tackle packaging first and “sort the rest later”. In reality, you are building in a world where shelf, socials, e-commerce, PR, and content all shape whether a brand lands.
So yes, shelf dynamics matter. But so does how your brand shows up on Instagram, TikTok, and on digital stores from day one. So the physical design has to also work in a digital-first world.
The same goes for focussing the budget on one element and not doing the rest yet, as there’s not enough.
Don’t ignore whole sections because budget is tight. Scale the level of ambition instead. Build a lighter version of everything now, then make it modular so you can add depth as you grow. A small amount of work across the key building blocks pays dividends later.
And to repeat: most creative agencies aren’t drinks specialists. Spirits has its own commercial dynamics.
Serve strategy, on-trade realities, advocacy, price positioning, and B2B sell-in all shape what “good” in context looks like. If you have a sales lead, or someone who understands your category and route to market, pull them into the process early, even if it’s just for checkpoints.
None of what you create happens in a vacuum. Consistency and specialist industry context often creates more cut-through than great design alone.
What to get be sure about before you brief an agency
Before you brief anyone, check you’re clear on what you’re building and why it should exist. Forget polished statements. Focus on locking in the fundamentals.
- Who the drink is for, and the occasion it’s designed to win.
- The price point you need it to hold.
- What your brand needs to communicate most (your why / USPs).
- Your route to market, and where you plan to win first.
- Your liquid truth: what’s distinctive about it, and how it expresses your values and personality.
- Your non-negotiables: what must stay consistent as the brand grows, and what can flex.
When those answers are missing, agencies end up designing into uncertainty. That usually means extra rounds (added costs), late compromises, and a finished result that feels less coherent than it should.
Invest in a better creative start point
Preparing fully before you brief an agency can feel backwards. You might think: why spend time or money getting clear, when the agency is going to pull it apart and rebuild it anyway?
In practice, that early clarity is what stops you losing months to second-guessing, late compromises, and design rounds you didn’t need. It gives you faster decisions, a stronger sense of ownership, and a clearer instinct for what’s right for the brand, so you don’t end up with something “nice” that you can’t evolve once the initial project is delivered.
If you do it early enough in the process so that you can act on the insight and feedback – it’s also one of the best financial decisions you can make when building a new brand.
A day of consultancy or a few focused sessions working through a strategic toolkit is peanuts compared to the cost of multiple extra agency rounds, print revisions, and rework triggered by gaps in the brief.
Lastly, while agencies will always be polite, keep in mind that goodwill and creative energy running out is real. Good partnerships shouldn’t feel like a tussle.
When you arrive with a well-formed direction, strong inputs, and a considered base they can sharpen, you get better work because the team is designing with confidence, not guessing.
Beyond the obvious mission, vision, values, and the above items about what you should be sure about, there are other pragmatic elements to share that are helpful. Constraints and ambition for example, shape everything. Be explicit about these inputs:
- Timeline: a 10-12 week launch demands different choices than a 12-month runway. Especially for packaging.
- Sales volume forecasts: They set expectations, indicate RTM priorities and open up cashflow conversations around what is feasible.
- Scale of ongoing support: a tight year-one launch needs a focused asset suite; a high-spend rollout needs a broader system from day one.
- Route to market: DTC, retail, on-trade and export put different demands on packaging, margins and messaging.
- Compliance: where you sell changes what must be on pack and how artwork gets approved.
A practical note on budgets
A frequent question is “how much should I budget for design?” and there isn’t a single number that’s useful to state. It depends on your ambition, route to market, and whether you’re going custom with the glass or not.
What is useful is how you split whatever budget you do have, so that you don’t run out of steam.
As a rule of thumb, split your design budget into thirds.
One third goes into the physical packaging: bottle choice, label design, structural decisions, print finishes, and making the product feel right in-hand. One third goes into the brand world: the identity system, website, digital templates, and the asset kit you need to show up consistently online. The final third is your “life after launch” fund: activations, ongoing content design, and the evolution work you’ll need to use once you are in market.
The split can flex depending on how you’re building.
If you’re going bespoke glass, it can feel more like 50% pack / 40% brand world / 10% ongoing, because the physical side simply costs more. If you’re using off-the-shelf bottles, it can look more like 25% pack / 50% brand world / 25% ongoing, because the brand identity and digital system carries more of the weight early on and needs to have more impact given that’s where more of the differentiation is coming from.
Mark up your competitor set early
Competitor clarity is not about emulation. Don’t be shy about it. Set the playing field and state which brands matter the most. Who is relevant when it comes to attention, sales and shelf space. If you don’t define who you’re genuinely up against, someone else will.
Agencies need a reference point to judge whether the end outcome will be successful. Who a person refers to as their close competitor set often reveals how well they understand their future reality. Vis versa, who an agency states they are benchmarking the creation against speaks to their understanding of the industry.
Choose a benchmark set that reflects your reality: the same price point, shelf environment, category cues, and route to market. Include brands you admire and brands you want to outperform.
Then use the comparison to make stronger choices, not safer ones!.
If you want a step-by-step way to do this, it’s covered in more depth in the Creative Strategy and Brand Planning Toolkit, and in the Route to Market resources on Everglow.
Brands are alive, not static
Brands are living things. You can’t brief them in once, launch them, and expect them to thrive on autopilot. Like anything you bring into the world, they need energy, attention, and good decisions over time.
That’s true for the liquid, the storytelling, the way you show up in market, and the design work that holds it all together. You’re creating something that will need nurturing if it’s going to grow.
That’s also why the supplier relationship matters as much as the output.
In an ideal world, you’re not hiring someone to deliver a one-off project. You’re choosing partners you trust, who understand your intent, and who you can keep building with as the brand evolves.
Early on you might need one kind of support to help you bring it to life, then different expertise as it starts to find its feet and mature. But the goal stays the same: a team around you that can keep pace with the brand as it grows, and help you protect coherence while you keep moving forward.
Keep that in mind as you select your team. They are not a means to an end. They are partners on your journey.
What to do next?
If you’re not sure where to start, don’t begin by firing off quote requests and hoping someone pulls the strategy out of you.
Start by getting clear on the fundamentals, then brief with intent. That’s what protects time, budget, and creative energy.
I’ve managed agencies and led this process many times, from brand strategy through to route to market and liquid NPD. I’ve also been an observer to the process and where my job role has been liquid only, or distillery build only and been forced to stay quiet as I watched and I’ve also watched it go wrong when suppliers aren’t aligned and the brief is unclear.
Some do it with ease and deliver successful concepts, some struggle, go over budget and end up with outcomes that don’t live up to their initial potential. Creating something special is never easy.
So – if you want help shaping the brief, sequencing the work, or acting as the glue between specialists, drop me a line. A small amount of upfront clarity tends to save a lot later, and it usually leads to a sharper outcome. Email me – olivier@everglowspirits.com
Want to learn more? Take a look at this conversation about How to build value through custom bottles & bespoke packaging.
