Success through design
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Award winning design
W
hen Isklar decided to add a sparkling variant to its already successful still water in its multi award winning facetted PET bottle designed by Blue Marlin Brand Design, the same agency took up the seemingly impossible challenge of creating something equally impressive. The brief was simple enough. All the client wanted was ‘Wow’. Having already created the unique facetted bottle for Isklar still glacial natural mineral water, the challenge was to replicate the stunning, distinctive crystalline design for the sparkling variant. And what a challenge it turned out to be. Meeting it involved redefining the bounds of possibility in packaging.
The pressure is on Bottle manufacturers said it couldn’t be done. Sparkling water bottles are cylindrical because the considerable pressure exerted by carbonated water pushes outwards and flattens the sides. Creating a facetted bottle that mirrored the dazzling design of Isklar’s still mineral water and that could withstand those pressures seemed a near impossible task. The final solution represented a triumph of creativity and determination. Isklar and its agency.
Reinvention Blue Marlin wrestled with every known configuration of materials to create a stable bottle. In the end, it had to reinvent plastics geometry in a radical new way to make it happen. Each and every one of the bottle’s 174 facets was analysed and modified. Each was given a unique curvature profile and a series of beading on the facet border; together with a petaloidal base, they created a structurally sound sparkling bottle that matches the unique beauty of the still water.
Designed to succeed Isklar introduced its sparkling version to complement its successful still water in March 2010. It had strong initial success with the larger format bottle (975ml) achieving the dizzy heights of fastest selling SKU after eight weeks in the market.
Isklar Sparkling is a gently sparkling water with millions of tiny bubbles that make it lightly refreshing and pleasing to the palate without being overpoweringly fizzy
Back to the drawing board: design stages in realising Isklar’s ‘impossible’ bottle © Water Innovation 2011. Reproduced with the kind permission of FoodBev Media - www.foodbev.com For details about syndication and licensing please contact the marketing team on 01225 327890.
www.foodbev.com/water Issue 64 - January · February 2011
SPECIAL REPORT 35