Iron Fish
Company:
Berlin Packaging, Studio One Eleven
Country: USA
Category: Alcoholic Beverages
Iron Fish is Michigan’s first farm-based distillery, born on the waters of the Betsie River. Their Estate Series honors the natural resources that are at the heart of the distillery’s origins. These high-quality spirits are made with grain grown on the property and pay homage to the nearby watershed, and its steelhead, that inspired the brand’s name. When developing the packaging, Studio One Eleven’s designers were influenced by the land, water, and people that are all part of Iron Fish’s heritage. The custom design leverages the stock bottle shape of the distillery’s other products, but with a taller, more slender silhouette for an elevated aesthetic. The designers incorporated a label inspired from 1940's vintage fishing licenses. The company’s distinct steelhead logo is sculpted into the bottle as another premium detail, adding dimension and strengthening the brand equity. The final design reflects the distillery’s regional roots and premium quality.
While most brands use a package’s label to feature their logo and showcase other iconic visual elements, the Iron Fish Estate Series bottle takes things one step further, extending the brand’s visual equities to the bottle itself. The design and innovation team at Berlin Packaging’s Studio One Eleven created a custom package that incorporates one-of-a-kind fish and scale etchings. Iron Fish’s illustrative steelhead logo was modified for three dimensions and sculpted into the glass. The goal was for the fish to appear to be swimming in the bottle. This required several rounds of tooling modifications and sampling to ensure that the definition of the fish would be properly represented in the glass. Fish scales were also designed and sculpted into the bottle and developed in such a way to accommodate molding requirements.