When one of America’s most popular drinks risked becoming wallpaper, this Antwerp-founded studio found the answer in translucent orange panels and Mediterranean waves.
There’s a particular challenge reserved for brands that become too successful. Aperol knows it well. After Forbes crowned the Aperol Spritz America’s most popular drink in 2024, the Italian aperitif faced an ironic crisis: ubiquity had made it invisible.
In other words, when your bright orange bottle appears everywhere from Coachella to corner shops, how do you stop people from scrolling past? Antwerp and London-based studio WeWantMore had an answer, though not the obvious one.
Rather than screaming louder or plastering logos everywhere, they did something more interesting: they bottled golden hour.
Design an operating system
The challenge was deceptively simple. Aperol had just completed a rebrand to restore some premium polish to its image. The visual identity looked sharp.
But what happens when that identity needs to work in a Milan flagship bar, at a music festival, in Rome’s Fiumicino airport and on a supermarket shelf? Most brands would create a style guide and hope for the best. WeWantMore built something more like a design operating system.
The breakthrough came from focusing not on the product but on the moment around it. Italian aperitivo culture has a specific quality: that warm, convivial hour when the sun hangs low and the first drink signals the transition from work to pleasure.
WeWantMore realised this feeling (not the bottle, not even the drink) was what made Aperol resonate. Their job was to make every encounter with the brand feel like stepping into that golden-hour glow. What emerged is a design language that works through atmosphere rather than announcement.
Translucent orange wall panels cast sunset-like light across spaces. Concentric arches reference the setting sun without hitting you over the head with symbolism. Wave patterns suggest Mediterranean coastlines. Cherry wood bar tops and orange satin metal details create warmth without kitsch.
Even the seating was considered: cushioned chairs for relaxing, custom tables and counters designed specifically to showcase the drink and encourage the kind of leaning-in conversation that defines aperitivo hour.
Admirable restraint
Founded in Antwerp in 2006, the studio’s background spans hospitality design, retail and branding; an unusual combination that proved essential for creating a framework flexible enough to work everywhere while remaining distinctly Aperol.
The genius here, really, is in the restraint. These elements are signature enough to be recognisable but abstract enough to adapt. That means a flagship bar in Milan can deploy the full arsenal. A festival activation can just use a subset. A retail display can simply reference one or two details. The system scales up and down without losing coherence.
WeWantMore understood that premium is in the details. So they partnered with Raak Design Studios to create a series of bespoke product elements; the kind of custom touches that signal care and craft. These aren’t merely decorative flourishes, but functional pieces that enhance the experience at every level, from how the drink is served to how the space feels when you’re in it.
Key takeaways
This framework addresses a challenge many global brands face: maintaining consistency across wildly different contexts without becoming formulaic. Too rigid and you end up with identical, soulless spaces. Too loose and the brand fragments into incoherence.
WeWantMore’s solution works because it’s built around an experience rather than a checklist. Teams implementing the framework worldwide aren’t following rules: they’re recreating a feeling.
It’s also a reminder that environmental design has become as crucial as logo design for brand identity. When your product appears in thousands of locations, the space around it does as much communication as the packaging.
Aperol’s challenge wasn’t that people didn’t recognise the bottle—it was that they’d stopped noticing it. By controlling the environment, WeWantMore made the brand feel special again.
There’s something quietly satisfying about watching a design solution that trusts atmosphere over aggression. In a landscape where brands increasingly compete through volume (more touchpoints, more content, more aggressive visibility), Aperol has gone in the opposite direction. They’ve made their ubiquity feel intentional rather than accidental; premium rather than pedestrian.
The lesson for other creative professionals isn’t to copy the translucent orange panels or the concentric arches. It’s to recognise that sometimes the answer to a branding challenge isn’t in the product itself, but in the experience surrounding it.
WeWantMore didn’t redesign Aperol’s identity: they designed the feeling of encountering it. That’s a significantly more interesting brief, and in this case, a more effective one.
