Absolut Vodka knows how to use packaging as the best of marketing tools, and with great skill it has always managed to communicate various images with the same bottle. But with Absolut Unique and Absolut Originality the Swedish concern has outdone itself, creating four million unique pieces.
Following decades of experience making sure each bottle is exactly the same, Absolut Vodka has turned this practice on its head by declaring that no two bottles should be equal. To make possible what at first appeared a mad dream, an unthinkable gamble, it was necessary to redesign the concern’s entire production process. Coloring machines and robotized arms equipped with spray guns were built, and a special algorithm was developed in order to implement a near infinite sequence of combinations of 35 colors and 51 designs.
Once the rules were set, the machines did the rest, and the Absolut Vodka facility was transformed into an abstract painter’s studio.
In these terms, with the creation of an enormous quantity of bottles, all different and numbered, rather than a limited number with a single design, the philosophy of the collector’s item has been reversed from an agonistic search for rarity to “whichever bottle you find will be unique”.
All that happened just one year ago; as always, tireless in its constant proposal of novelties, Absolut Vodka has just launched Absolut Originality, a new limited edition of “four million unique pieces”, artistically decorated with a refined effect that highlights the crystal of the glass and bestows each bottle with streaks and hints of blue, the symbolic color of Absolut.
A bottle that is always different, created using technology which is cutting-edge but which models itself on the artisanal techniques of the Swedish master glassblowers, as well as the use of drops of cobalt glass in the melted glass heated at 1,100°C. By fusing together, they produce patterns that are always different.
But that’s another story.
