Why spirits brands are losing the occasion war (and what design can do about it)

Champagne does not own celebration because of what is in the bottle. It owns celebration because of what surrounds it.

The pop. The pour. The golden colour in the glass. The ritual has been built and reinforced over decades until it became cultural shorthand. Champagne is not just a drink. It is a signal. And that signal was constructed, deliberately, through branding.

Dark spirits have not done this. Whisky, cognac, bourbon: these are categories with extraordinary liquid credentials and almost no ownership of a specific cultural moment. That gap is a branding problem, not a product problem.

The occasion nobody has claimed

Celebration is the most commercially valuable drinking occasion in the world. It is the moment when consumers trade up, when gifting decisions are made, when a brand earns its premium positioning. Champagne has owned it so completely that the conversation rarely goes elsewhere.

But Champagne has a structural limitation. A bottle opened for two people is rarely finished in a single sitting. It does not reseal well. It is expensive to waste. These are genuine friction points for a consumer who wants to drink less but celebrate more.

The occasion is there. The consumer need is real. The brand that builds the ritual around a spirit to fill that space has an open market in front of it.

What ritual actually requires

Occasion ownership is not a campaign. It is not a seasonal activation or a limited edition. It is a sustained investment in building the emotional association between a brand and a moment.

Coca-Cola and Christmas is the textbook case. That connection was not built in a year. It was built through consistency of visual language, tone, and storytelling across decades until the brand became part of the ritual itself. People do not just drink Coke at Christmas. They expect it.

Spirits brands asking how to own an occasion need to answer three questions first. What is the moment? What is the serve that belongs to that moment? And what is the visual and narrative identity that makes the brand inseparable from it?

Getting those three things aligned is a design brief, not just a marketing one.

The Hendrick's lesson

The reinvention does not always need to be complex. Hendrick's Gin put a cucumber on a black bottle and repositioned an entire category. The liquid was premium. The design signalled that it was not your grandfather's gin. One visual decision changed the conversation, opened the door to a new serve, and created a ritual around it.

That combination of the unexpected garnish, the distinctive bottle, and the cultivated bar culture around the brand is what built its occasion ownership. It was not accidental.

Reinvention in practice: Strutter Whisky

We worked on Strutter Whisky with exactly this thinking. The brief was not to make a whisky that whisky drinkers would appreciate. It was to make a whisky that would make a new generation look twice. To challenge the clichés of Scottish heritage and the old-guard visual language that has kept whisky pitched at the same drinker for thirty years.

Strutter was recognised at the Harpers Design Awards. The recognition matters less than the intent behind it: that design-led reinvention of a traditional spirits category is not just possible, it is commercially necessary.

The tequila model

Tequila has done what dark spirits have not. It became more inclusive, shed its associations with low-quality shots, and built new rituals around premium positioning. It is one of the few spirits categories growing consistently. That trajectory was led by branding as much as by product.

Whisky, bourbon, and cognac have the liquid quality to compete. What they lack is the willingness to walk away from the clichés that no longer serve them.

The brands that will win the next decade are the ones that design for the moment they want to own, not the one they inherited.

Hamish Campbell, Denomination's US Executive Creative Director, spoke about spirits brands finding their Champagne moment in Harpers Wine and Spirit, April 2026.