Greg Dillon, Strategist at the legendary global design agency Stranger & Stranger, dives into the keys to standout spirits design in an insightful Bar Convent London masterclass on how to escape the pull that rewards familiarity, but ultimately punishes difference by stripping away your pricing power and consumer recall. Greg outlines the three fundamental design moves that the world’s most successful premium brands make to stand up, stand out, and command a premium.
Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands launching and scaling in the U.S. market.
Greg Dillon’s Presentation Transcript
Greg Dillon (00:04)
I’m Greg—that’s me, very happy in the tux. I’ve been in and around the whiskey industry for about 15 years now, working either at design agencies or, similarly to Georgie actually, running an independent bottling company with my wife. I focus a lot on the consulting, consumer, and strategy side of things, which is the hat I’m wearing today. I have been working with Stranger & Stranger for the last 12 years.
Greg Dillon (00:28)
Today, I’m going to talk about how brands escape looking like everyone else and break what we call “category gravity.” Essentially, our overarching brief at the agency is to make brands that sell themselves. We want to create packaging examples that are counter-worthy, beautiful, desirable, and genuinely wanted by consumers.
Greg Dillon (00:56)
The challenge in all consumer categories is fundamentally simple: eventually, everything starts to look the same. Brands fall into using the same shapes, colors, and visual language. In some sectors—especially historically—if you take the logos off the bottles, everything just blurs together. There’s no real uniqueness to be had unless you intensely focus on the strategy, the story, and ultimately, the physical packaging and delivery. This brings us back to category gravity.
Greg Dillon (00:26)
Categories naturally reward familiarity and punish difference. You want consumers to instinctively understand your product, even if they can’t consciously articulate it. Think about the established visual codes in Scotch whisky, for example: traditional core ranges are structured around 12, 15, and 18-year-old expressions. In supermarket terms, that operates effectively as “good, better, best.” It’s how the industry communicates and how the public understands value. You see those exact three tiers across pretty much every core range, whether you’re looking at a supermarket shelf, the Scotch whisky world, or other evolving spirits categories.
Greg Dillon (01:54)
When you design into those parameters, they create a gravity that pulls you in because it feels safe. But when you actively break that gravity and successfully stand out, you unlock an incredibly powerful point of difference. The danger of falling into standard category gravity is that your product leaves no memory or recall. You lose your pricing power, and you give the consumer zero distinct reasons to actually choose you.
Greg Dillon (02:22)
If you look like everyone else, you will be compared directly to everyone else. If you stand up and stand out—which is the phrase we normally use on our closing presentation slides—it actually gives your brand somewhere to breathe, somewhere to speak, and a place to truly stand apart.
Our rebrand of Bushmills is one of my favorite examples of this approach. Standing out is not about raw visual volume; it’s not about screaming and shouting. If you walk through an airport today, navigating global travel retail (GTR), everything is bright, loud, and incredibly colorful. You practically have to wear sunglasses just to walk down the concourse! Ironically, because of this, some of the darker, more muted brands are starting to stand out simply because they contrast with the rainbows of color splashing bloody everywhere.
Greg Dillon (03:21)
As part of our upfront strategy work, we spend an immense amount of time walking through airports taking countless photos of every single bottle on display. I actually posted something on our Instagram page the other day about this. My wife asked me for the photos from a five-day trip we took to Ireland over Easter. I looked through my camera roll, and there was literally one picture of a cow, one of the four of us up a mountain somewhere, and about 300 photos of whiskey bottles in different bars and stores that I was mooching around in. It’s just our life! She didn’t really appreciate those being stitched into a family video, though.
True standout isn’t about volume; it’s about direction. It’s not about being louder than your neighbor; it’s about telling the right story. There are three primary moves that great brands make in order to tell that story properly: remove, borrow, and exaggerate. You don’t have to execute all three, but nail at least one, and it will completely change the game for your brand.
Greg Dillon (03:49)
Let’s look at subtraction first, using Isle of Harris Gin as the case study. If you look at the packaging, it is incredibly clean, calm, and mellow. The strategy here was all about intentionally removing the chaotic design elements that other brands rely on. By stripping away the visual noise, you create a sense of calm in a hyper-busy category where absence itself becomes the distinction.
Greg Dillon (04:18)
The semiotics embedded within that bottle are off the charts when you look at the details. For instance, when you look dead-on through the glass, the ridges create the physical pattern of Harris Tweed. The subtle blue tint isn’t a solid colored glass; it’s actually a specialized spray applied exclusively to the bottom of the bottle. It matches the exact Pantone reference of the water around the Isle of Harris. The design team did extensive research to root all of these little details in a sense of place. Even the paper label is technically unique; the labels are cut from a massive, singular master sheet design at different stages, meaning no two bottles feature the exact same piece of art.
Greg Dillon (04:47)
Even though details like that aren’t broadcast to the masses in advertising, that level of layered storytelling provides brand ambassadors with something genuine to say. It gives retailers a compelling narrative to share with customers if they’ve been briefed properly, and it definitely gives me something to talk about right now! Ultimately, your packaging is your silent brand ambassador when brand owners and ambassadors can’t be in the trade to explain it themselves. That pack has to work unbelievably hard to convey depth and layers in a succinct, elegant way.
Another move is translation, or what I like to think of as cultural borrowing. St. Cloud is a fantastic example of this—it is effectively an American whiskey that is behaving like a premium cognac.
Greg Dillon (05:44)
In terms of its pack design, structural aesthetic, and overall identity, it pulls visual codes from entirely outside the traditional world of whiskey and translates them into a new space to create something spectacular. The reason you immediately notice it on a shelf is precisely because it acts like a cognac instead of a bourbon. It stands out, it’s unbelievably heavy in the hand, and thankfully, the liquid inside is decent too. By doing something unexpected, the brand gains immediate traction, commands shelf space, and drives trade conversation.
Finally, we have amplification. A personal favorite of mine to work on was the rebrand of Powers Irish Whiskey. We spent an amazing amount of time digging through the Irish Distillers (IDL) historical archive.
Greg Dillon (06:13)
As a proper whiskey geek, as soon as we got inside that archive room, I was set for the day. The sheer volume of historical photos and documentation was completely off the charts. What our research revealed was that you don’t always need to reinvent a historic brand from scratch; you don’t need to rethink everything from the ground up. In this case, the answer lay in isolating one singular historical asset, exaggerating it, and pushing it further.
Greg Dillon (06:42)
We iconified the entire brand identity around the classic Powers “P” and the diamond shape. We didn’t reinvent the brand’s soul; we just sharpened it because clarity will beat complexity every single time.
The commercial results speak for themselves: distinct brands get noticed faster, stay remembered longer, and command a premium price. Distinctive design isn’t just surface decoration; it actively drives pricing power, premium perception, and genuine brand love. It builds what we call “loyalty beyond reason.”
Greg Dillon (07:13)
We saw this clearly with the global launch of The Kraken Black Spiced Rum when Stranger & Stranger designed it. Wowzers. The fan engagement was wild. The team actually ran a consumer competition that had to be abruptly stopped for legal reasons that I am 100% not going to get into while recorded on a live mic! They had asked fans to submit photos of their best Kraken tattoos, and the sheer volume of entries that flooded in was mad. Thankfully, I haven’t seen all of them myself, but I’ve certainly heard about them.
Let’s talk about how we actually work together internally as an agency. I handle the strategy, storytelling, and market positioning—what I often describe as providing “the logic for the magic.”
Greg Dillon (07:43)
Essentially, I’m the guy responsible for producing unfathomable amounts of strategy slide decks and PDFs. However, unlike a lot of creative agencies out there, we don’t work in isolated silos. It’s true that I’ll do all the upfront strategy framework—especially on the whiskey side where my core joy and industry competency lies. But our workflow isn’t a case of me saving a PDF, emailing it over to the design team so they can make it look pretty, and then handing it off to production to make it functional.
Greg Dillon (08:11)
It is an incredibly integrated, tandem process that I often describe as a “follow the sun” approach. Because the Stranger & Stranger entity spans three global design studios, our London and New York teams work hand-in-hand daily. We have about 21 different nationalities represented across the company, which is an incredible asset when handling global design briefs.
Greg Dillon (08:40)
It means that a brand strategy deck I’m writing can be instantly passed over to our New York team to sense-check it, ensuring it holds international validity and isn’t just me rattling off random ideas. On the creative side, having a multicultural team makes us highly sensitive to cultural nuances, colorways, and regional phraseology. A piece of messaging or a color palette that feels incredibly eloquent in one market might be an accidental cultural trigger in another. You cannot afford to upset consumers in another part of the world with your packaging, so a unified team is vital. The designers always push back, of course; whenever I try to present them with 132 pages of deep, insightful strategy, they look at me and say, “For Christ’s sake, Greg, can you just crunch this thing down for us?”
Greg Dillon (09:37)
The journey always begins with total brand immersion. When we kick off a project, it’s not just the account managers or the strategy team who go out to the client. We send a full representative cross-section from every single department—right through to our technical production specialists. Even though production won’t technically touch the mechanical artwork files for a hell of a long time down the line, they are right there at the initial distillery immersion. They are at the kickoff meetings, tasting the raw spirit, walking the warehouses, and absorbing the physical sense of place—the local heat, the energy, and the people behind the liquid.
Greg Dillon (10:05)
All of that ambient data matters. If you don’t have that direct, visceral reference point to the liquid and its origin, it’s a lot harder to build authentic design layers later on. Alongside brand immersion, we deeply map the competitive landscape—not just tracking how competitors behave commercially, but analyzing their physical packaging structures and how they communicate. We look to see where the open spaces are for us to execute something genuinely different, constantly interrogating the category codes.
From there, we move through audience mapping, brand positioning, and strategy alignment. Once the foundation is solid, the design phase kicks off.
Greg Dillon (11:00)
Our creative concepts are intentionally made to move. It starts with strategic mood boards, evolves into structural pack sets, and goes through continuous iteration and refinement until we lock in the perfect expression. At that stage, our production team steps in to ensure those creative ideas can actually run down a commercial bottling line without getting stuck, editing and nuancing the specs where necessary.
Our portfolio spans startups looking for their first commercial break, complete brand overhauls for existing players looking to revitalize their narrative, and massive global brands.
Greg Dillon (11:29)
We’ve handled some major global assignments over the years, from the recent Knob Creek refresh to Dewar’s Double Double range, which was another personal favorite of mine to work on. We also specialize in line extensions. When a brand already has a core product, the challenge is: how do we extend that range while maintaining a premium family feel across the portfolio? You have to do that seamlessly, so the consumer doesn’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily lobbing another liquid into the market; it still requires a beautiful narrative arc across the range to make commercial sense.
Greg Dillon (11:59)
Our work carries all the way through to building complete Visual Brand Identities (VBIs). We define how the brand comes alive off the physical packaging and transfers into the real world across every consumer touchpoint—everything from brand activation tools to digital media and moving advertisements.
Consistency is absolutely key when you take a brand to market, especially when you are executing a major relaunch. If you are putting all that time, capital, and effort into developing a bespoke glass structure, source-printing new labels, and establishing a new way of speaking, you want it executed flawlessly. A rigorous design framework maintains brand integrity, streamlines future creative output, enables seamless line expansion down the road, and makes life infinitely easier for your regional marketing teams later on.
Let’s do a quick reality check. I quite like this image on the slide here.
Greg Dillon (12:56)
I made sure this slide wasn’t vetoed by the committee when I put the deck together! It has been sitting on my desktop for the best part of three years, and I haven’t been able to find a presentation slot to use it in until today.
Great design is the ultimate commercial answer, but you can’t just blindly design your way out of market sameness. The real process starts much earlier, carries on much longer, and requires incredibly disciplined, creative thinking. You aren’t just putting a pretty bottle into the market; that package has to exist for a precise commercial reason, sitting in the right place, at the right time, for the exact right consumer so that picking it up and buying it is a total no-brainer.
Greg Dillon (13:23)
It sounds simple in reality, but the process gets messy and it gets tough before you land the final result. You have to constantly ask: What is everyone else doing? What can we remove? What can we amplify? You have to dive deep into the micro-details while constantly balancing the larger operational realities of the business to deliver it successfully.
To summarize: categories naturally create gravity. Great brands intentionally choose where to break it. If you look like everyone else, you’re just going to be benchmarked against them. Stand out, stand up, and definitely do not fit in.