The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2024
Contraband packs each cocktail as a different Prohibition smuggling artifact
Cocktail brand Contraband makes every bottle a story from its own Prohibition underworld: heists, censored police reports, leet notes and wanted posters.
Contraband Cocktails · Purple
What it had to solve
The cocktail brand Contraband — named from the Italian contrabbando, "smuggled goods" — needed packaging that captured the hidden creativity of Prohibition-era smuggling tales. Five different cocktails had to feel like pieces of one smuggled world while each still told its own story.
How it works
Contraband, a cocktail range, takes its name from the Italian contrabbando — "smuggled goods" — and from the hidden creativity of Prohibition-era smuggling tales. The packaging brief was to make bottles feel like evidence from that world rather than ordinary products on a shelf.
Purple and Open Studio Stockholm built a system in which each drink is a different artifact from the same underworld: Paloma's pack unfolds a heist story, Milano Spritz hides a poorly censored police report, Negroni speaks in leet, Apple Mule resembles a threatening letter, and Gin & Tonic carries a Western wanted poster for two outlaws. Framing ribbons and hastily written cocktail names tie the five packs together.
The result is a range that reads as one visual family while each bottle rewards a second look with its own tale. The work is preserved in D&AD's Packaging Design awards archive, and the entry carries no sales figures, so the case rests on the idea and the system itself.
Why it lands
- Basing each flavor's pack on a different smuggling artifact gives five SKUs five distinct reasons to be read while staying one coherent brand.
- A name that already means smuggled goods supplies the whole visual world, so the design feels inevitable rather than invented.
- Consistent props — framing ribbons, hurried handwriting — make the stories feel like evidence from one shared universe rather than five random themes.
- Hiding each story inside the pack rewards curiosity and shelf-level second looks, which is exactly what a new range needs.
What it did
The system let every drink tell its own tale while the range stayed visually coherent, turning each bottle into an object worth reading. D&AD keeps the work in its Packaging Design awards archive.
What you can take
If a name already contains a story, spend the whole design on entering that world: one shared narrative system turns every product in a range into a reason to stop and read.
Since then
The range's packaging is preserved in the D&AD awards archive, which credits Purple as entrant and design agency, Open Studio Stockholm as co-designer, and names Contraband Cocktails, 20-gruppen and Fluid Minds among the clients. The archive page records no pencil level and no public sales metrics, so the case stands on the design idea itself.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card