Stranger & Stranger (London and New York) is a packaging design and branding company that works in one category – alcoholic drinks. When you create more than 100 drink brands every year, innovation becomes more than an accessory. It's essential to what you do, or you'll be repeating yourself over and over.
So a paper wine bottle may seem extraordinary even to you packaging industry insiders. To Stranger & Stranger, it's all in a new day's work.
The bottle, called Paperboy, was created for US wine company, Truett-Hurst. It consists of a moulded outer shell made from recycled cardboard and a plastic liner. At just 0.86 kg when filled, it is 85 per cent lighter than a glass bottle and collapses when empty, making it easy to recycle. It also uses 15 per cent of the energy needed to make a glass bottle.
Yet its shape resembles a typical glass bottle.
The bottle’s cardboard outer can go into mainstream recycling streams, which are used to produce other cardboard products. The cap and neck assembly pieces are also recyclable, and the plastic liner is suitable for “waste to energy” programs.
Truett-Hurst intend to use the bottle for its appellation-based, super-premium wines. It is mindful, though, that the light bottle's most obvious consumer advantage is that it is easy to carry, so it is also marketing it for the wine lover on the go.
“Wines that will be consumed almost immediately do not need a heavy, environmentally and economically expensive glass bottle and cork,” winemaker Virgina Lambrix reported.
“We would rather apply the savings that PaperBoy affords toward more expensive, better-crafted wine so that both the customer and the environment win.”
Wine is a conservative industry at its top end, but Truett-Hurst is optimistic that, "...if the quality of the wine exceeds a customer’s expectation, then new cutting-edge packaging will become more mainstream.”
The creative thinking behind PaperBoy belongs to Stranger & Stranger's Kevin Shaw. Shaw worked with the Truett-Hurst Inc. team and Green Bottle, a UK-based paper bottle manufacturer, to develop the new bottle he called Paperboy.
“This is a product that is unashamedly different, and it was important that the name was iconic to own the medium, and that the branding was bright, strong, fearless,” Mr Shaw said.
