Established in 2011, Pennington Distilling Co. is an artisan distillery nestled in the historic Nations neighborhood of Nashville, TN.Pennington’s Pickers Vodka, the company relays, “is an excellent, handcrafted vodka that reflects Nashville’s distinctiveness.” Distilled 11 times through Pennington’s state-of-the-art column still, filtered four times, and blended with premium Tennessee limestone water, the vodka is distinctive indeed. However, the packaging in which the spirit launched in April 2015—a stock bottle with a plastic closure—was not.
In 2018, Pennington looked to Berlin Packaging and its Studio One Eleven design team to redesign the bottle to reflect the vodka’s uniqueness. The caveat was that the new structure had to be able to run on the distiller’s existing filling line with minimal disruption.
According to Scott Jost, Berlin Packaging Vice President of Innovation & Design, as with all new structural packaging design projects, Berlin began by auditing Pennington’s filling, capping, and labeling capabilities to understand the interplay between the processing equipment and the soon-to-be-outgoing packaging. “Concepts that require no line modifications or adjustments are considered ‘operationally invisible’ solutions,” he explains. “For the Pickers project, we targeted minimal operational impact by maintaining filling-head height and bore, overall diameter, label area, and the closure within the range of existing equipment adjustability.”
Other than height, diameter, and label area though, the new bottle strikes an entirely different chord, embossed with details that clearly connect the brand with its music city roots. The clear glass bottle, designed by Studio One Eleven and supplied by Berlin’s Bruni Glass division, prominently features an embossed guitar pick bearing the iconic three stars of Tennessee’s state flag near the its neck. To reinforce musical connections and influence, the two sides of the bottle are embossed with the neck of a guitar, giving Pickers a matchless look from every angle.
