Six Barrel Soda’s original packaging with its hand-stamped flavours allowed them to mix up small batches and one-offs and get them in front of customers quickly. Demand for their soda syrups grew rapidly and hand-stamping labels in volume became too inefficient. With a strong focus on shelf presence, our approach was to develop a new packaging solution for them to take them forwards, while remaining true to their roots. A careful balancing act between logo, colour and pattern has helped Six Barrel Soda become the hippesterist soda in town.

We set ourselves the challenge of creating a colourful label system that described the flavours in a playful way. Some of these flavours were easy to describe (like lemon or cucumber), others not so (we’re looking at you sarsaparilla…). To this we refined the fruit illustrations from the original labels and added a tamper proof neck label for peace of mind to create product range that has both shelf and street appeal.

In addition to their core product range we worked with their team to design lines of limited edition drinks, seasonal and experimental labels as well as collaborations between them and other organisations both in New Zealand and overseas.