Strange new shores

One of London’s most celebrated drinks brand designers has decamped to the States, Patrick Schmitt asks Kevin Shaw what lured him over.

Stranger & Stranger’s Kevin Shaw

Ok, so we all know we shouldn’t judge people or products by their outward appearance, but none of us can help it. From the friends we make to the books we buy, it’s the look that counts, initially at least. And this is true in drinks too. Although those in the trade don’t like to admit it, consumers are undoubtedly swayed by the packaging, and particularly when confronted with unknown products and a lack of promotional offers.

Sadly however, slim margins and play-safe commissions are forcing the creativity out of the UK.

Indeed, London has just lost one of its most talented designers, the man behind many of the drinks trade’s most successful and recognisable products: from the seven-point star of Clos de Los Siete to the circular cut-out of Ogio, and, more recently, mould-breaking black spiced rum The Kraken, which comes in a double-handled black bottle with an octopus on its label.

This person, in case you haven’t guessed, is Kevin Shaw, the founder of Stranger & Stranger. Even if you haven’t drunk one of his designs, you’ve doubtless been tempted due to their intriguing and attractive appearance.

Thankfully however, we traced him to the US, where he was on holiday hiking up California’s Lost Coast, before returning to his new base – New York City.

So why has he moved from the UK? For Kevin, the enthusiasm and energy in the US was just too inviting, while Britain was proving increasingly limiting. In fact, his company, which he established in 1994, hasn’t left London, and the UK office, based in Clerkenwell, is still operational, if reduced in staff numbers.

Rather, Kevin has decided to set up a new outpost in New York, not only to expand the Stranger & Stranger business, but also guard against that reduction in daring commissions mentioned above.

“We were definitely getting stifled by the buyer system in the UK,” he says.

“No one really wanted to stick their neck out and try new things and I can’t really say I blame them given their margin targets.”

“The briefs all started sounding the same,” he continues. “Way too many ‘similar to Blossom Hill’ lines, so we started doing work in the US where the attitude was very different and it was all about standing out and upselling: I wasn’t used to people saying things like, ‘this looks great, we’ll increase the price point’.” However, it was two US commissions in particular that prompted Kevin to leave the UK: The Kraken and Avion.

They were both, he says “mould- breaking”.

“We weren’t getting those kind of ‘hell, yeah’ opportunities in the UK.” He also observes an intoxicating enthusiasm in North America, something he says, was irresistible for an “ideas guy”.

As a result, Kevin recalls, “One day I asked if anyone in the studio wanted to move, and it nicely split the firm in half.”

And already, Kevin admits that the company may be opening a third “satellite” office in San Francisco.

FREELANCE FOUNDATIONS

Stranger & Stranger is named after a designer term for a moonlighting job – a stranger in a studio is someone that doesn’t belong there – and before Kevin started the company, he and a friend were freelancing in the evenings and had nicknamed themselves Stranger & Stranger.

And 18 years since it was founded, the firm is still picking up accolades for good design – it won in almost every category in the db awards for design this year – but it is also seeing its products sell: Stranger & Stranger designed the labels for Ogio and McGuigan, brands that have showed double digit growth last year despite stagnation in the retail wine market.

When asked what’s kept the company at the forefront of packaging innovation, Kevin immediately mentions his team, who, he says, “constantly amaze me”.

Important character traits for him are energy and resilience. “I remember John Harvey-Jones being asked about the one quality he looked for in his people and he said, ‘stamina’. I have to say everyone at Stranger has that in spades…Most people have been there a long time, the expectations are high and the hours are brutal and to keep pushing creative work at that level every day takes sheer bloodymindedness.”

Nevertheless, a conservative client or limited budget are major constraints for packaging designers, Stranger & Stranger included. Kevin admits: “A lot of the work that gets on the shelf is actually a watered-down version of our concept,” although he also says, due to the long lead times, “we usually start further out”.

As for the costs, while Kevin says he can do amazing things with stock bottles and a decent printer, he adds: “the big issue we’re facing these days – and only in the UK wine market – is a reduction of production specifications to such an extent that even we are struggling.

“When you get a brief that says: one color on a 60mm square label – to save ink and paper, you know margins are super tight. But it’s difficult to create anything standout with one hand tied behind your back.”

PACK POWER

The Kraken

If one is to persuade clients to invest more in the product’s appearance, how important is the look? “I tell new clients that we’ll get you the first sale, but only your product will get you the second sale.”

Then again, Kevin points out: “All straight vodka is ethanol, water and a milligram of impurities, so the reason people will pay ten times more for a specific bottle has to be down to the power of the pack and the brand.”

Interestingly, Kevin struggles to name a well-packaged drink that has failed. “I have no problem at all naming badly designed ones,” he says, “but I do have a lot of trouble naming well-designed failures.”

Vital to success in drinks design is undoubtedly creating something that will tap into current trends but not doggedly follow what people say they want – particularly when using consumer focus groups, according to Kevin.

“Henry Ford said that if he’d asked people what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse, and I think the research process is too open to abuse and can lead to homogeny,” he says. “There’s a big difference between understanding consumers and asking them what they want and most of our work, including the big sellers, has never seen a focus group.”

Outside the US, one might have thought Kevin would be interested in China for new work, not only because there’s growth in wine and spirits consumption, but also because knowledge is low and western letters unrecognisable for most, making label appearance all the more important. However, he’s scathing of the impact on design of this emerging market: “China is dragging wine packaging back to the dark ages, or at least the 70s: they all want traditional labels, some red, some gold, some eights, no black, no white space and nothing challenging,” he says.

“I sat in a debrief on Chinese packaging recently and I asked the Chinese- American moderator why some people were so superstitious and why they thought the number eight was lucky. She just looked at me coldly and said, ‘it is lucky!’ You can’t argue with that.”

Nevertheless, Kevin is not averse to gimmicks in packaging, rating them highly when they represent imaginative innovations that bring attention to a product. He cites his groundbreaking lenticular label for Lo Tengo from Bodegas Norton in Argentina. Featuring just the legs of a couple doing the tango, the image moved as the bottle turned or the viewer changed position. It wasn’t easy though, as Stranger & Stranger had to develop a special lens that worked on a curved surface. “It was a gimmicky spike brand that couldn’t be sustained when the local currency recovered as the labels were all hand-applied,” he recalls, while proudly noting that Norton managed to sell two million cases of the brand before that point.

VML

He adds: “It got more PR than any wine brand we’d done before or have done since and it opened up 72 new markets for Norton.

“Spike brands have got a perfectly respectable place in any marketing mix, they are the best place to experiment with innovation and creativity and we should see a lot more of them in the wine market.”

SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Avión Tequila

Understandably, Kevin is happy to discuss what he believes to be his greatest accomplishments in drinks design. But when asked what have been his most successful pieces of packaging, he begins surprisingly with a Tesco one – their exclusive wine label, Ogio.

“It is smart and simple, and when it was launched, it kicked against all those crusty, boring Italian labels,” he says.

“But the sheer worldwide volume success is down to the fact that you can spot the design from 50 feet away.”

Other than that, he mentions The Kraken black spiced rum again and points out that the recent release of Captain Morgan Black is the “sincerest form of flattery.”

He also lists this year’s db award-winner for wine, VML, as one of his most cherished achievements. It’s a Russian River Pinot Noir made by biodynamic producer Virginia

Marie Lambrix, and Kevin, taking the controversial agricultural philosophy and aesthetics of old witchcraft depictions as inspiration, created a black and white label featuring a mythological gathering of  robed men in cow skull masks blowing into horns.

“It has won everything apart from the Olympic Gold medal this year and that’s down to a trusting and open-minded client,” he remarks.

“They’re sold out too, which is a nice problem for them to have.” And a failure? Kevin, exhibiting honesty and modesty, can acknowledge when he’s been wrong, and again, his first choice for his design disappointment surprises.

After consideration he names Avion – the Tequila unveiled two years ago in New York bars but also on hit US show Entourage, where its launch formed part of the storyline.

“It was a unique opportunity to create a brand on an iconic TV show like Entourage and our first brand idea was brave and equally iconic and one of the best things we’ve done, but the client choked and wanted something more mainstream,” he recalls. “Great PR but not a great piece of design…I learned a lot from that job and changed the way the company operates completely to stop it happening again.”

Finally, Kevin admits to a “major gaffe” back in 1999. “The millennium was approaching so I thought it would be a great idea to have a countdown clock embedded into the label of a bottle of fizz.

“Of course the production got scaled back to make the price point and when the clocks arrived from Asia they weren’t just out by a few seconds, some were out by days.”

In a hint that this might be the first time he’s told this tale, he adds: “A lot of water has had to go under many bridges for me to be able to talk about that job.”

Clos de Los Siete