Not only did the new limited-edition design for Johnnie Walker Blue Label double sales, the gift packs cost 20% less to manufacture than target, positively impacting profitability.
With just one in 10,000 casks selected for whisky Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Diageo collaborated with Butterfly Cannon to amplify the luxury beverage’s rarity by redesigning the brand’s gifting series.
Centred around the creative concept of Rare Discoveries, an adaptable design system was developed. This extended the programme’s reach by enabling 12 participating markets around the world to flex the creative platform to their locality.
Supported by assets and guidelines to ensure a harmonised style across markets and communication channels, each market-specific gift pack was instantly recognisable as Blue Label while capturing through illustrations the rarer, undiscovered sides of their own city or country.
The Rare Discoveries series’ striking, culturally relevant designs applied across the bottles, gift boxes and communications collateral for each market, provided high visibility in the cluttered gifting season and annual sales grew 100%, double the 50% target. Manufactured to a comparable level of quality and finish as the previous gifting series, the innovative design system led to a cost of goods saving of 20% versus the earlier series, improving gross margin by three percentage points.
