Antwerp studio WeWantMore’s refresh of BRU trades a second-long shelf glance for a seat at the table.
It’s become such a cliché in packaging design, you’d think it was law. Everything needs to be optimised for that single second a shopper glances at it on a shelf. It needs to stand out from the crowd, lure people in. You only have the time it takes for a heart to beat, so don’t waste it. Throw everything you have into drawing the eye.
All of which makes a lot of sense. But it’s useful to remember that not every single product is fighting for attention from tired and time-poor supermarket shoppers. Sometimes, packaging needs to do very different things.
Sparkling water is a great example. Many of us go to the supermarket for the low-cost stuff, where we expect them to pile it high and sell it cheap. But when we’re in a restaurant, the design of a bottle—whether it’s wine or water—is an important part of the experience.
In short, we want something to visually elevate our evening out. And that’s something Belgian sparkling water brand BRU, which has long been associated with fine dining, understood well.
Who is BRU?
BRU can trace its origins back to the 17th century, when it started bottling the natural spring water of Stoumont, in the Ardennes. In modern times, it’s been commercialised as a table water brand through the Spadel group, with a name shortened from the French word bruisser (meaning to rustle or murmur).
What is stylish and sophisticated at one time, though, can be perceived as old-hat and boring a few decades on. And in recent years, however, BRU had become increasingly perceived in this way.
WeWantMore, a creative agency founded in Antwerp in 2006, set out to change that, repositioning it “from a restaurant staple to the finishing touch for the table, designed for every meaningful moment shared around food.” An important aspect of that was shifting the focus of the packaging from trying to stand out in the shop to being something people would be proud to display on their table.
Calm and disciplined
The new packaging does a great job of putting that idea into practice. The tone is calmer, with a colour palette centred around a deep navy blue that both feels refined and evokes obvious associations with water.
The existing brand emblem of a leaping stag is now sleek and sculptural, while avoiding the “minimise everything down to nothing” trend that might have robbed it of all its distinctiveness. And while the lettering is colourful and decorative, it never overwhelms the label, thanks to a disciplined approach to the use of white space.
The result is a design that delivers exactly what WeWantMore set out to achieve. A bottle that people would actively want in front of them while eating, and a brand slogan, “Some things just belong on the table”, to drive it all home.
Key takeaways
For designers in general, I’d say there are a couple of key takeaways from this story. Firstly, don’t ever assume what your design needs to do. It might seem obvious to you that something, for example, needs to stand out on the shelves, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it won’t even appear on the shelves at all.
Yes, we all want to dive into making cool things as soon as possible. But before you open that Photoshop document, before you start brainstorming even, you need to be absolutely sure you understand the product, the business behind it, the target audience.
The second lesson, I think, is that heritage is an asset to treasure, but rarely needs to be preserved in aspic. WeWantMore could have kept its stag exactly as it was, or completely ditched it; both approaches would probably have been disastrous.
Instead, they subtly modernised it in a way that didn’t alienate fans, but would also attract new ones. That’s never an easy task, but if you pull it off as a designer, the world will soon be beating a path to your door.
