If, sometime this century, you have been to a bar or wandered into a liquor store, it is likely you are familiar with Stranger & Stranger, even if you don’t know that about yourself. It is likely, even, that you have interacted: Why, in your quest for spiced rum, did you buy the Kraken and not the Captain Morgan? One possibility is that you have a cultivated palate and know exactly what you like. The other is much simpler: You wanted spiced rum, and the Kraken bottle—with the inked octopus and the tentacular looped handles—looked cool, and so you bought it.
Is it good rum? Stranger & Stranger doesn’t care about that. “It has absolutely nothing to do with us,” says Kevin Shaw, the 64-year-old Brit who is the design firm’s founder. “It’s much better to have this great fantasy about it,” he says. They get a description of what it’s supposed to taste like, and that is enough. “I don’t want to know that it tastes like crap,” he says, and so he ensures he doesn’t know. What he does know, perhaps better than anybody else alive, and maybe dead, is how to tell a story about booze.
“It’s like being the world’s most famous plumber,” says Shaw. In the world of spirits producers, Stranger & Stranger is Rihanna; in the universe made up of pretty much everybody else, nobody knows they exist. “I’d be surprised if the majority of bartenders had heard of them,” says Charlotte Voisey, executive director of the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, a spirits education and advocacy group. And yet their work is everywhere. “They’re working with everybody,” says Mark Byrne, co-founder of Good Vodka. (They are working with Good Vodka.) The company, says Simon Ford, co-founder and co-creator of Fords Gin, has “changed the face of spirits.” (They are not working with Fords Gin.) “If you went across the backbar 20 years ago, it’d be very glossy,” he says. It was showy and slick, which, at that time, had been exciting. “Stranger & Stranger kind of led the way back to craft paper,” Ford says. “Think about the emboss. Think about the printing.” You see their impact everywhere. “Now, when a brand is in trouble and they think it’s the label’s fault,” he says, “the number one place they want to pick up the phone [and call] is Stranger & Stranger.”
The story Shaw likes to tell about himself is very simple: He was at a wine auction in 1994 in London, and his friend, a fellow wine nerd, observed that the wine labels were very bad. “I said, ‘Well, we can do something about that.’” At the time, he was a graphic designer working on campaigns for Dell. He found this very boring, but it was also wildly lucrative—“I mean, just colossal amounts of money changing hands”—which afforded him certain freedoms, such as self-funding his own immersion in the world of South American wine. Then he showed up at Bibendum, a leading U.K. wine distributor—and the closest one to Shaw’s Soho office—and, using his newfound expertise, told them he should do their labels. They told him they had no budget for labels. He told them that was fine; he’d do it for wine. They sent a truckful that required Shaw to dedicate a room in his house to it, and he proceeded to drink it for the next 10 years.
The first job he did for them tripled sales. “The wine is the same. The bottle is the same. It’s just the impact of this little green square piece of paper.” At the time, wine labels were not good. In fact, Shaw will go one step further: They were very bad. They did not always include basic information, such as what kind of wine was in the bottle. Often, they were in French. Wine people, Shaw felt, were in so deep they could not understand that most normal people have very little idea what they are doing in the wine store. They spend maybe seven seconds making a decision. “If you want to appeal to the modern-day consumer, you need to make things bold and simple and easy to understand,” Shaw says. His radical idea was that the label should effectively communicate what the wine is, and what a person is supposed to do with it. “There wasn’t anything deeper than that.”
What really put the firm on the map, though, was a label he did a few years later. “The brief, like all good briefs, was really simple: An old Argentine winery wants to get noticed.” He had a vision for a lenticular label—the lenses create movement and depth—featuring two tango dancers, which was technically unprecedented; nobody had put a lenticular label on a wine bottle before, probably because it is insane. It took Shaw and his colleagues a year to figure out the logistics. Because lenticulated labels could not and still can’t go through labeling machines, they had to be applied by hand. This required the winery to “employ an entire village,” he recalls, which was not ultimately tenable in the long term, but “gave me a real attitude of thinking anything was possible.”
This is occasionally frustrating to other people, because, in fact, anything is not possible; you have to contend with outside forces, such as the limitations of physics. For the Kraken bottle—the company’s first foray into spirits—Shaw had initially wanted eight loops around the neck, like tentacles, because “you know, it’s based on a giant squid.” Unfortunately, “there’s just no physical way you can do it,” he says, still sounding slightly disappointed. “They would get stuck in the mold, and they wouldn’t be able to be pulled out.” The 2010 bottle, with its mere two loops, became Stranger’s first billion-dollar creation.
These days, despite Shaw’s marriage to winemaker Virginia Marie Lambrix (he did some of her labels), 90 percent of Stranger’s business is in spirits, which is “way more interesting” than wine. “The majority of the problem with wine is that people very, very rarely do bespoke wine bottles,” he sighs. The wine business doesn’t have the margins to support it. But in spirits, there are resources. “Ninety-nine percent of the liquor brands we get want to create a unique piece of glass,” he says. “When we design these crazy things, the CAD guys”—the people making the technical specs—“are always, like, in shock-horror,” says Shaw, delighted. Their panic is his accomplishment: Clients go to Stranger & Stranger because of projects like Chicas, Megan Thee Stallion’s tequila, which is packaged in a twisting ombre bottle that is “irregular on every axis” and took engineers more than 1,000 total hours to pull off. “It’s an absolute—pardon my French—mindfuck to try to work out how they can get these things out of a mold at speed,” says Shaw. “It’s an incredible set of expert knowledge.”
Despite the depth of Stranger & Stranger’s portfolio, or perhaps because of it, it’s hard to get an exact handle on the scope of the firm’s contributions to the backbar, even for Shaw himself; it is safe to say designs number in the many thousands. The firm has 38 employees at work on the approximately 60 projects the company has going at any given time.
The client list includes Jack Daniels, Dewars, Don Papa, Bushmills, Italicus, Howler Head and Martini & Rossi. They do Via Carota’s bottled cocktails. They do the labels for Snoop Dogg’s 19 Crimes wine. No company has done more to define the look of drinking, and yet, if it is succeeding, there should be no way to know. Shaw emphatically insists that the company has no discernible fixed style. “You can’t have an aesthetic in this business,” he says.
“I have in the past literally been like, ‘Oh, I bet that’s Stranger & Stranger,’” says Voisey. “It’s nothing specific,” she says. But if she sees a bottle unlike something she has ever seen before, if the shape is new or the glass etching is different, she has the thought. “It’s like, because that seems to be an innovation in bottle design, it’s probably Stranger & Stranger.”
