How to build a new drinks category: What the rise of non-alcoholic spirits taught us

The hardest brief in drinks branding is not a rebrand. It is not even a brand launch. The hardest brief is building a category that does not yet exist.

There is no shelf position to reference. No consumer behaviour to borrow from. No competitor to benchmark against. Just a tension in the culture, a product that answers it, and the design challenge of making something unfamiliar feel completely inevitable.

That is the challenge our US Executive Creative Director Hamish Campbell knows better than most. Before joining Denomination, Hamish led the creation of Seedlip, the world's first distilled non-alcoholic spirit. It remains one of the most studied category creation stories in the drinks industry.

What it taught us about brand building is still shaping how we work.

Categories are created by tension, not trends

Every category that matters starts with a clearly defined problem. Not a product improvement. A genuine cultural conflict that existing options fail to resolve.

With non-alcoholic spirits, the tension was specific: adults who chose not to drink alcohol had no credible, sophisticated option at the bar. The choice was a soft drink or nothing. That gap was not a niche. It was a legitimate unmet need waiting for the right brand to make it legible.

The strategic lesson applies across the drinks industry. If you cannot name the tension your brand resolves, you do not have a category strategy. You have a product.

Design makes the unfamiliar feel earned

When a category does not exist yet, design carries an unusually heavy load. It has to establish trust before the consumer has any basis for it.

For Seedlip, that meant leaning into the visual language of premium spirits. The bottle structure, the colour palette, the crafted illustration system. Every decision borrowed credibility from an established world and redirected it toward something new. The brand did not ask consumers to take a leap of faith. It gave them enough familiar signals to feel safe taking one step forward.

This is what we mean by Intelligent Bravery. Not recklessness. A deep understanding of category semiotics, used to know exactly which rules to follow and which to break.

Build a system, not a campaign

The brands that survive category creation are not the ones with the best launch moment. They are the ones with the most coherent storytelling system.

A system separates what stays fixed from what flexes. The brand's core truth, its tone of voice, its visual logic: these do not change. The stories told around them evolve as the category matures, the consumer shifts, and the competitive set fills in.

This is especially critical in the no/low alcohol space right now. The category has moved from novelty to mainstream with speed. Brands that launched on the strength of a single positioning idea are already under pressure. The ones building durable brand worlds, with the design depth to flex across occasions, formats, and markets, are the ones gaining ground.

What this means for brands in the no/low space today

The no/low alcohol category is no longer uncharted. There are established players, crowded shelf sets, and consumers with genuine brand preferences. The category creation window is closing.

What remains is a design and differentiation challenge. Brands that entered early on the strength of the category novelty now need to earn their place on merit. That means sharper brand identity, more coherent visual systems, and storytelling that goes beyond the absence of alcohol toward a genuine reason to exist.

That is exactly the kind of brief we build for.

Hamish Campbell, Denomination's US Executive Creative Director, spoke in depth about category creation, cultural forecasting, and the philosophy of Intelligent Bravery in a recent interview with Roastbrief.