Anthony D. Paige

Hendrick's Gin

In 2008, William Grant & Sons, a luxury spirits portfolio based in the UK, approached us with a challenge to spearhead efforts across the U.S. to increase brand awareness for their flagship gin product. 'A Gin Made Oddly', and voted (qualify)'The Best Gin in the World', Hendrick's is produced via a singular process of craft and distillization, which utilizes a 70-year-old Carter Head Still (among the last which remain in the world), and the curious addition of crisp cucumbers to the bouquet of botanicals which provide the gin with it's complex aroma and flavour.

At the time, Hendrick's represented a small niche within the U.S. gin market; this was about to change.

Regularly meeting with the WGS Hendrick's team in their NYC offices, I and the other project stakeholders made it our job to become the (strike/ absolute) de facto experts on the brand, immersing ourselves in the product and its process, studying all available analytics and existing brand material so as to coordinate multimedia spends strategically, and brainstorming to the far corners of the imaginal realms for the all that would come to represent the Hendrick's brand upon successful proliferation.

What followed over the next three years was a massively-coordinated, expertly-executed, seven-figure build, launch, and market strategy, which would propel the Hendrick's brand into position as the most desirable gin on the market.

)To accomplish this----?) We envisioned the Curiositorium, a large-scale online museum of oddities and strangeness that visitors could completely lose themsleves within. Dressed to the nines in the Hendrick's aesthetic, the Curiositorium, would be an extraordinary effort utilizing a team of world-class talent across multiple disciplines of interface design, content strategy, development, media planning, illustration, and animation, garnering praise from brand advocates and industry thought leaders alike - and resulting in multiple agency awards.

IA and Uex and Content Strategy One thing was certain from the beginning - the WGS team didn't want just another brochure site. Careful attention was given to planning out the experience of immersing onself in the Curiositorium - to the degree that, upon embarking on multiple distinct approaches to building this massive architecture, we found it necessary to print the

while the page print-outs, when posted in real space on the wall, extended throughout the office, into and out of individual rooms Thousands of pieces of art were sourced from various old books, individually scanned, redrawn, and piantstakingly animated into the unique Victorian, quasi-steampunk, Rube-Goldbergh, madcap style which would come to represent the personality of Hendrick's Gin.

The Unusual Times, an online and print newsletter for curious denizens of distinguished taste, provided unique approaches to cocktails, oddball facts, and a slew of complete fictions written to both entertain and inform the growing community of Hendrick's drinkers around the world, while also building up to the launch of the Curiositorium.

The months of long hours, hard work, occasional frustrations, sudden insights, and sometimes back-tracking paid off - the final products were a fascinating, gorgeous, entertaining, and beautifully-functional portfolio of Hendrick's brand collateral, a growing global community of fans, . We'd created a world.

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