A package protects, promotes, and sets a product apart. This series looks at how iconic packages took shape.
Coke bottle
- Introduced: 1916
- Design concept: The Root Glass Company
- Material: Glass
Fountains of wane: For over a decade after Coca-Cola was introduced, it never saw the inside of a bottle. First produced by John Stith Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, in 1886 as a syrup, it was named for ingredients coca leaf (cocaine was removed around 1905) and kola nut. It was sold to local soda fountains, where a soda jerk added carbonated water and served it in a glass.
In 1899, Chattanooga lawyers Joseph Whitehead and Benjamin Thomas won the rights to bottle Coke, forming the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, according to the company’s account.
Bottling cola was lucrative, and other companies began doing it too. Along with selling soda in the same standard straight-sided bottles, they chose such doppelganger brand names as Koka-Nola, Toka-Cola, and Koke.
By 1915, the company decided that the way to foil the knock-offs was to develop and patent an inimitable bottle. They sent a design brief to around 10 glass companies across the country, with a simply worded challenge for a complicated task: develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”
Ahead of the curve: When the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, got the brief, it was perhaps when searching for images of the coca plant that they stumbled on the cocoa bean, which has grooves that run along its length. They knew that the cola didn’t contain cocoa, a Coke spokesperson told Quartz in 2005, but the designers still liked the pod, and that was their inspiration as they went about making sketches for the design.
The prototype incorporated the ribs of the cocoa pod, but the bottle was cinched in the middle. When Root Glass patented the design in 1915, to keep it a secret from those similarly named knockoff colas, it left the embossed Coca-Cola logo off the design and made no mention of Coke in the patent application.
The original design was even more curvaceous and tended to topple on a conveyor belt, so the contoured shape was streamlined. The new bottle, introduced in 1916, remained rounded enough, though, that it was sometimes called the “Mae West” bottle, after the va-va-voom actress.
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In 1928, the volume of Coke sold in bottles overtook soda fountains, the company says.
Why it works: “There are so many things that are desirable around that bottle,” Rutger Thiellier, executive creative director at CBA USA in New York, told us. “It’s the grip—it’s built around the usage,” which Thiellier said is commonplace today, “but that was like the big story with Coke at the time, and [it was] the first bottle that would do that. And…it wasn’t spikes that would dig into your hands to make sure it doesn’t slide out of your hands; no, it was very round and sensual.”
The bottle is “one of the classics in packaging history,” the late industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whose own work with Coca-Cola included being on a design team that revamped the design for king and family-size bottles in the 1950s as well as designing a soda fountain, wrote in a letter to the company. “The Coke Bottle is a masterpiece of scientific, functional planning…I would describe the bottle as well thought out, logical, sparing of material, and pleasant to look at.”
One for the road: The design has been emulated in some of the unlikeliest of places. “Coke bottle style” was popular in automobiles, especially muscle cars like the Chevrolet Corvette and Dodge Charger of the early 1970s. It referred to how the vehicles, whose fenders at the front and rear wheels were wider than the doors, resembled the silhouette of the bottle when viewed from above.
Getting smashed: Martin Lindstrom, the branding guru and author, has even commented on the universal lesson in Coke’s original brief for the design that said even a broken glass segment should still recognizably be a Coke bottle. He calls it the “Smash Your Brand” test.
“The Coke bottle story reveals a fascinating aspect from a brand-building perspective because, in theory, all brands should be able to pass this sort of test,” Lindstrom wrote on his website.
“So if you removed the logo from your brand, would it still be recognizable?” Lindstrom asked. “In short, can your brand survive being smashed?”