Old Curiosity Distillery
Distilling the brand. A label of love.
The Old Curiosity Distillery is one of the UK's most distinctive premium spirits producers: a small, botanically driven distillery rooted in the Secret Herb Garden on the outskirts of Edinburgh, famous for colour-changing gins made entirely from natural plants and flowers. When they needed a brand capable of sitting alongside the world's great gins, Cogworks built it from the ground up. Within the year, Old Curiosity was on the shelves at Harvey Nichols.
From herb garden to premium spirits shelf
Old Curiosity had everything a brand needs to resonate: a genuinely extraordinary product, a compelling origin story rooted in herbology and alchemy, and a co-founder with a deep knowledge of botany and a belief that gin could be something more than most people expected from it. What they needed was a brand identity capable of communicating all of that to a retail buyer, a luxury stockist, and a curious first-time customer simultaneously.
The challenge was positioning: how do you take something born in a walled herb garden and make it feel at home on a shelf at Harvey Nichols, without losing the authenticity that made it interesting in the first place?
Finding the mythology
The creative strategy began with research, branding workshops, and a competitor analysis that mapped where Old Curiosity sat in the premium gin landscape and what the opportunity was for genuine differentiation. The answer was not to chase the conventions of the category. It was to lean into the distillery's own story more deeply than any competitor was prepared to go.
Taking inspiration from mythology, herbology, and alchemy as represented in the distillery's botanical origins, we developed a brand methodology built around the idea of transformation: plants and flowers becoming something extraordinary through a process that felt closer to craft and ritual than industrial production. The colour-changing quality of the gins was not a marketing trick; it was the physical expression of the brand's whole philosophy.
A brand built to be held
The visual identity and packaging needed to work as hard as the product inside the bottle. Sophisticated design was married with distinct stylised copy that gave the brand a voice as distinctive as its appearance: lyrical, curious, and quietly confident. Every label told a story. Every touchpoint reinforced the sense that this was something rare and worth discovering.
The result was a brand that earned its place in Harvey Nichols - not by competing on conventional terms, but by creating its own register entirely.
"We would 100% recommend working with Cogworks." Steve Ross • Co-Founder • Old Curiosity Distillery
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Here’s everything you need to know about projects like this one.
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Client Strategist
@ Cogworks
Katie Grant Watson
