Carving a Niche with Design
For many businesses, standing out from the crowd in an already crowded marketplace is a mammoth task. But for Fresquita one of the ways they tackled this issue was with highly creative packaging.
Fresquita is Madrid’s first premium hard seltzer. Hard seltzers come in many forms but typically consist of an alcohol base mixed with sparkling water. Fresquita is a hard seltzer combining vodka with sparkling water. It comes in three flavours: lime, raspberry and pineapple so there is something for everyone.
Founders Alex and Beatrice first became acquainted with Hard Seltzer’s back when they lived in Amsterdam and soon fell in love with them.
“What we love about Hard Seltzer was how clean it was. We live a healthy lifestyle but wanted to keep up our healthy habits even in our social time. We left Amsterdam and missed this cleaner living option so decided to start up our own one in Madrid,” comments Alex.
Hard Seltzer began in the US back in 2016 with brands like White Claw leading the market. The drink is tailored to an audience who are increasingly looking for drinks with a lower alcohol percentage with less and more natural ingredients.
Combining Alex’s 5 years of sales experience both in the US and Europe selling alcohol brands such as LOLEA; and Beatrice’s 5 years of design and illustration they set about crafting their hard seltzer.
SMALL STEPS
With Hard Seltzer being such a new concept in Spain, initially the founders had some difficulty finding a distillery that knew what Hard Seltzer was and could help them develop a great one.
“Part of the challenge when you are introducing a new product to the market is the lack of awareness of it even at the manufacturing level. Very few of the distilleries knew what a Hard Seltzer was, let alone had tried one,” comments Beatrice. After much back and forth they found the perfect spot in Barcelona.
“Once we had gotten over that initial hurdle and had a product that we were happy with we turned our attention to the packaging design. During the design stages we often asked ourselves, in a market with a known heritage of more traditional alcohol options such as wine, sherry and beer, how could we convince someone to try something new?”
PACKAGING
With such a new product that people are not familiar with, the founders found it imperative to create attractive packaging for the brand. The brand’s designer Beatrice explains more: “ We wanted to entice people’s curiosity by creating an attractive product that people would be excited to try. As my co-founder Alex is half Swedish, I was inspired by his Nordic roots to build the packaging of the brand. The typography for our brand was inspired by nordic runes. On our cans, above our brand name I made an icon which represents Odin’s eye. In Nordic mythology Odin;(who some of you may recognise as Thor’s father from the Marvel films), sacrifices one eye in order to gain higher
knowledge. “We like to joke that his missing eye is the one that you find on our cans’” adds Beatrice.
“For the illustrations of the flavours we wanted them to be an interpretation of the faces of famous Gods. We loved the idea of combining a fresh and modern design with touches of classical mythology to ground the brand. So our Raspberry flavour represents Aphrodite, our Lime Artemis and our Pineapple flavour the sun god Apollo.”
EMBRACING THE SENSES
Beatrice and Alex also found ways to make their Hard Seltzer a full sensory experience. As well as both the sense of smell and taste, the founders were very playful with the sense of touch when it came to the packaging design.
Alex explains “ We wanted for Fresquita to have a certain texture to it so that it would be instantly recognisable in any bar or restaurant. We also felt that the relief applied to the logo sent signals to the consumer about the quality of the product. It’s an artisanal, premium product and we wanted to ensure that the packaging reflected that.”
Fresquita is exclusively sold by Stagnettos in Gibraltar. If you would like to order it for your bar or restaurant send an email to info@vivafresquita.com.
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