As a Brand Designer, I Was Living In a 'Design Utopia' — Until I Started My Own Product Company, and Reality Hit Owning my own spirits company gave me insights into the tough business decisions my clients had to make every day.

I thought I understood my clients' needs. Then I started doing the same work as them — and realized how much I had to learn. It was humbling, but it also made me better at my job.

Back in 2001, I cofounded an agency called Love, which designs brands, packaging, communications campaigns, and experiences for the likes of Jim Beam, Johnnie Walker, and Guinness. Over the years, we've come up with a lot of ideas that never saw the light of day; we called them "urchins" — wily ideas without a home. So in 2020, we launched Urchin Spirits, with hopes of filling "fat niches" in the spirits market — or underserved segments with low barriers to entry, but significant growth potential.

But pretty quickly, we realized there were a lot of external factors affecting our clients' decisions that we'd never had to worry about as designers.

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For example, we came in with a distinct vision for our first product, an Irish whiskey-based liquor we'd named Lucky Sod. We wanted it to look short, stubby, and heavy (which meant thicker glass at the bottom), and to top it with a cork stopper instead of a screw cap to help it feel distinct and premium.

But once we took a hard look at the margins for our designs, we saw just how expensive glass can be — so we took some out. And then we took out some more. We started selling the product, but retailers told us that the bottle was a little too wide, that we were being greedy with shelf space. Then bartenders told us that the cork was annoying, and they'd prefer a screw top.

As all this was happening, I started to think about how I'd advised clients in the past. Like a lot of creatives, I lived in a kind of "design utopia" — a place where design matters more than all other considerations. I've pushed clients to adopt the "best" design, even if it made bottling and packaging more complicated. At the time, I genuinely believed I was acting in their best interests.

But we'd never had to put our own money behind our ideas. When making Lucky Sod, I started to see the conflicts of those considerations. If we spent more on a glass bottle, we'd have to spend less on the quality of the liquid. If we held to our original vision, we'd risk annoying the retailers and bartenders we rely upon. Was that the right thing to do, in the name of pure design?

That was just the start; other challenges would follow: Spiraling energy costs and the war in Ukraine have caused a glass supply shortage in Europe. There's been a rise in duties on alcohol, which has squeezed margins even more. Higher alcoholic percentages (ABV) mean you have to cross higher duty thresholds, but going lower can mean you lose quality. As a creative agency, these might not have been on our radar. Now they are — and as a result, we're having better conversations with our clients. We have firsthand learnings about the price sensitivity in the market, or what's working activation-wise and how consumer tastes are shifting, and we bring those insights into our design projects.

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We no longer always push for the most bespoke, premium design. We'll still show clients the "design utopia" version, but if that's running a little rich, we'll also show them the silver and bronze options. We try to help them source more affordable, sustainable solutions to glass, like aluminum outer packaging — designing it in a way where there are minimal trade-offs on the overall aesthetic.

Running a drinks business alongside the agency has sharpened my ability to find balance. Now, I hear the client's voice on one shoulder and the designer's on the other, but they're no longer in conflict — they're working together. Standing in our clients' shoes has helped us to see the bigger picture, and how our work fits into it. Clients can see it too. They know we get it, and our work is all the better for it.