AGENCY: Stranger & Stranger
LOCATION: London, New York, San Francisco
At Lovely Package you will usually see incredible new designs, one more beautiful & detailed than the other. The Hearach, designed by the world-famous Stranger & Stranger studio is no exception, the design is captivating, and immediately drew our team’s attention. It’s something we wanted to feature.
However rather than just feature the design this time, we reached out to the team at Stranger & Stranger to learn more about their approach, to better understand their process and why it is that they continuously hit the ball out of the (design) park.
Read below their story how they designed the Hearach Single Malt Scotch Whisky:
“How do you design an iconic bespoke glass bottle to reflect the provenance of this special place?
Located on the Outer Hebrides, to the northwest of Scotland, you will find the Isle of Harris – The largest island in the Outer Hebrides. Situated here amongst the weather-beaten coastal scenery is the Harris Distillery.
In the picturesque ferry port of Tarbert lies Harris’ first ever legal distillery. Unlike many of Scotland’s other distilleries, the Harris Distillery is not a distillery shrouded in history, dating back centuries. In fact, it doesn’t even date back decades as it was only founded in 2015. Despite that however, the distillery is already producing truly exceptional spirits, and are doing their part to make history.
The distillery has seen more than £10 million invested in its construction, and in the Autumn of 2023, The Isle of Harris Distillery released their first ever single malt – The Hearach. The demonym ‘Hearach’ references the inhabitants of Harris in Gaelic. Our brief with this bespoke whisky bottle was the same as per our previous design for Harris Gin, to simply “bottle the Island”.
Like all projects we do our homework. Visiting the island and speaking to the locals to get a sense of place and the modernity that the new distillery will bring (keep in mind that the distillery did not exist when we took the original packaging brief). This project was actually started nearly some 9 years ago, as we designed the whisky bottle at the same time as the gin bottle to be siblings to each other and have managed to keep the Hearach bottle design a closely guarded secret all this time until the recent launch. As mentioned our original brief was to simply “bottle the Island”. Our aim with both packs was to create a unique sense of place by reflecting the rugged unevenness of the landscape against the colours, patterns and textures found on Harris right down to the colour of the sea of Luskentyre beach and the ripples you find in the sand appearing on the gin bottle. Both bottles also have that Easter egg moment of discovering a certain famous fabric pattern from island by looking through the glass. It was important that the whisky bottle sat in the hand with comfort when pouring too. Since the launch day we’ve seen nothing but love and praise of the bottle design and of course the whisky itself!” – Stranger & Stranger
