Dewar’s Redesigns Its Packaging in O-I Glass

The redesign has enabled Dewar’s provenance and its rich heritage to be brought to life in a contemporary style. Every bottle features the year 1846, when Dewar’s was founded, and John Dewar’s signature.

Sep 3 2010 --- Dewar’s has introduced a new pack design for its range of blended Scotch whiskies. The most eye-catching feature of the new design is an innovative ‘wave’ in the bottle, symbolising the famous well-rounded flavour of Dewar’s. The ‘wave’ cuts through the paper pressure sensitive label to create a window onto the whisky inside.

“Dewar’s believes in making full, well-rounded whiskies that are enjoyable to drink. It is this well-rounded taste which was the inspiration for our new packaging design,” says Iain Kennedy, Senior Global Category Director - Dewar’s Whisky.

Designed by New York agency, Spring Design Partners Inc, and made by glassmaker O-I in Scotland, the stylish new packaging unites the Dewar’s range of whiskies as one cohesive family. Bottles for Dewar’s White Label and 12 Years Old have been released first, with those for 15 and 18 Years to come later.

The redesign has enabled Dewar’s provenance and its rich heritage to be brought to life in a contemporary style. Every bottle features the year 1846, when Dewar’s was founded, and John Dewar’s signature.

From a technical point of view, the wave was a challenging feature to accomplish. Scott Gibb, O-I Sales Manager in Scotland, says, “Dewar’s trialled the various bottles several times to determine risk areas and visual imperfections, for which they had very tight tolerances. We worked very closely with the client from the development of the CAD drawings through sampling and manufacture so we had a good understanding of what to expect. The result is excellent packaging with high visual quality and an impact that can only be achieved in glass.”

The basic shape of the containers remains the same as the previous design and the bottles are designed to share critical dimensions. This minimised change part costs on bottle handlers and labelling machinery. The range has also been reduced from around 26 to 20 containers by removing low volume models. However, the manufacturing and filling requirements are still highly complex – Dewar’s White Label has six lightweight, narrow neck press and blow variants (open pourer and non-refillable finishes on 70cl, 75cl and one litre sizes), along with four traditional blow:blow sizes – 375ml, 500ml, 1.14 and 1.75 litre.

David Hudson, Dewar’s Project Manager says, “We have an excellent working relationship with O-I and speak with them on a daily basis. In addition, we held weekly project meetings to go through each bottle development, look at the critical path, timings, samplings and so on. This was extremely important to us so we could align bottle availability with our other partners in engineering and production and ensure our machine part specialists were on-site for initial set up and line commissioning.”