Cutthroat Gin Slays With This Genius Bottle Design

Packaging is everything. Anything that will catch the eye of a potential consumer is a welcome guest for an upcoming brand. The wine, beer and spirits industry is wildly saturated with multiple levels of art, design and attention-grabbing copy for this very reason. Browse the craft-beer aisle of your local package store for inspiration. And what really is the difference between a $15 Pinot Noir and a $25 bottle?

Mousegraphics, a design agency based in Greece, created a unique and standout set of bottles for Cutthroat, a soon-to-be-launched gin.

The bottle is slightly off, as if it were sliced in half by a samurai sword and landed off kilter. The Cutthroat Gin name reflects this, with the “a” and “t” sliced at the ends and part of the “g” concealed. “A cut above the rest,” reads the back of the bottle.

“This gin is the common vision of two friends. One is Canadian and the other is Greek,” Greg Tsaknakis, owner and creative director of mousegraphics, tells Muse. “One is an expert in alcoholic drinks and the other in planes! We were given the name together with a plethora of design ‘instructions,’ which of course we ignored. The design idea—the container and the graphics—came about quickly, almost automatically, which is what almost always happens in our favorite works.”

Per mousegraphics’ website: “The Cutthroat brand is a new beverage choice with a sophisticated steam-punk attitude and distilling processes that evolved in the 18th century.” Which can explain why “Spirit of 1888” appears on the lower half of the bottle with a razor blade in the middle, a nod to the Jack the Ripper era.

It took two months for the agency to perfect a 3-D print mock up of the bottle and six months in total to produce a set of sample bottles.

Although the number of products has not been finalized by Cutthroat, mousegraphics created six different bottles, including one for tonic water made with cinchona bark from India.

Tsaknakis tells Muse that the biggest challenges in creating the bottles “stemmed from the production cost in relation to the material. We finally went with glass instead of ceramic.”