Package Deal: Before 1979, premium vodka bottles were tall and thin with colorful labels. Then Absolut changed everything.

A package protects, promotes, and sets a product apart. This new feature looks at how iconic packages took shape.

Absolut bottle

• Introduced: 1979
• Design concept: Hans Brindfors, Gunnar Broman, and Lars-Börje Carlsson, Carlsson & Broman
• Material: Glass

How Swede it is: When Lars Lindmark became CEO of Vin & Sprit, Sweden’s government-owned wine and liquor company, in 1974, he wanted to boost exports, specifically to the US market.

So the company began to develop a premium vodka that would derive its name from Absolut Rent Brännvin (translation: Absolute Pure Vodka), which had been introduced in Sweden nearly a century earlier, in 1879.

The assignment of designing a bottle for Absolut Vodka went to Carlsson & Broman, a Stockholm-based advertising and design agency. Premium vodkas like Stolichnaya had a standard approach then. “Vodka at the time was typically packaged in tall bottles with large crimson labels, an abundance of crests, and Russian-sounding names,” wrote Carl Hamilton in the Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising in 2002.

But the agency steered in the opposite direction. Gunnar Broman, the creative director, drew inspiration from an apothecary bottle he spotted in the window of a Stockholm antique shop, according to company accounts.

Hans Brindfors, the agency’s art director, designed the uncharacteristically stout bottle. And he took the unusual step of forgoing any paper label, instead printing the name of the brand in blue letters directly on the bottle. Smaller black type described the brand’s Swedish heritage.

The bottle was new and it was bold and the Swedes boarded a plane to the US to woo prospective importers.

“I booked a separate seat on the flight just for the bottles,” Gunnar Broman told a journalist in 2019.

But unlike that flight, the bottles, in those early days, just didn’t take off.

Nothing to see here: “An often repeated criticism,” Hamilton wrote, “was that the highly unusual bottle, having no label and hardly any color, would be virtually impossible to see on liquor store shelves or in front of a bar mirror.”

Some potential distributors even worried it would promote rival brands, raising “concerns that the bottle would…act as a magnifying glass, enlarging competitor labels,” wrote William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa in Deconstruction Product Design in 2011.

But Absolut stuck with the design, and in 1978 finally inked a distribution deal with Carillon Importers. One adjustment Absolut did make to the original design was to lengthen the neck of the bottle, based on Carillon market research results, which showed that bartenders had found the original too short to grip and pour .

And pour they did: Absolut debuted in the US in 1979.

Spin the bottle: The bottle had some early detractors, but Absolut’s ad agency, TBWA, wasn’t one of them.

Its first ad for the brand ran in New York magazine in 1981, according to Absolut (although some accounts say it was in 1980). In advertising parlance, the bottle is the hero. It’s in a spotlight and a halo glows above it, with copy across the bottom: “Absolut Perfection.”

It became the template for an iconic ad campaign, “Absolut _____,” that ran for nearly 25 years totaling ~2,000 ads. At first, the ads always featured the bottle, like one in chains (“Absolut Security”), with a thought bubble encircling two martini glasses (“Absolut Dream”), and with letters being blown off the bottle (“Absolut Chicago”).

But others only hinted at the bottle, like overhead shots of a swimming pool in the bottle’s shape (“Absolut LA”), or an aerial shot of New York, with Central Park in the bottle’s shape (“Absolut Manhattan”). Some had an almost “Where’s Waldo?” quality, like the palm of a hand that, on close inspection, had lines in the shape of the bottle (“Absolute Future”).

The ads seemed to be everywhere. And so it was that the bottle that early detractors dismissed as invisible became one the most visible in the world.

In 1985, just six years after its debut, Absolut overtook Stolichnaya to become the top-selling vodka import in the US.

Why it works: Rutger Thiellier is executive creative director at CBA USA in New York, where he’s led efforts to design packaging for liquor brands, including a jug-shaped bottle for Forty Creek Taproom, a Canadian whisky.

He said much of the design process is driven by how a bottle will look behind the bar.

“The silhouette is the most important thing in a bar environment because that’s all you see because it’s mostly backlit, or bottom lit,” Thiellier told us. “So you don’t see the design of the label; you see the shape of the label.”

Thiellier said it has served Absolut well to have settled on a silhouette that would never be mistaken for another vodka brand, like Stoli or Smirnoff.

The Absolut “shape is a strong outline, and…has created this icon within the vodka category that stands by itself,” he said.—AAN