We hand-built a whiskey bottle to win the pitch. And guessed the right one out of a hundred and fifty.

Cardinal & Company was one month old. Two Georgia-born businessmen wanted to launch a clear whiskey in the South. So we skipped the deck and built the bottle by hand: mould, label, back label, the whole object.

Out of roughly 150 liquor bottle shapes in the world, we’d picked the exact one they wanted. They took the brand identity too.

You could render a hundred and fifty bottles in an afternoon now. The one built by hand still wins the room.