Legendary Baijiu has been China’s favourite spirit for a long era, having been first brewed and consumed over 4000 years ago. It was the drink of choice of some of China’s renowned emperors, and was even used as medicine. To that end the Baijiu’s multi-facetted taste is not everyone’s taste, considering its bold notes. Under the verge of a transitioning society, the consumption of the traditionally sorghum-made alcoholic beverage declined and especially young people preferred more modern alcoholic drinks when gathering for drinks, food, fun and parties.

Chinese Baijiu and spirits brewery GDMZH Pearl Red approached product design studio Envary to completely develop a new Baijiu bottle design for its upcoming range of refined and taste-enhanced spirits, aimed at younger audiences across China. With the design team’s experience in glass bottle design (Envary previously worked with Italian and French glass manufacturers) and product packaging, first ideas were generated and transformed into distinctive design directions, also involving initial discussions how their new consumer brand Pearl Red should be integrated within the bottle design.

In collaboration with Pearl Red an iconic design concept was derived that alluded aesthetic and geometric-structural references to the architecture of the Hakka-tribes famous “earth houses”, right situated in Fujian’s Tulou region, which is picturesquely surrounded by a landscape of rolling hills and valleys. Due to Pearl Red’s brewery located in a nearby area, it was a close-knit chain of thoughts to iconically integrate the pristine hill shapes of the region into the bottle design, while emphasising a modernity-driven shape-transformation from a squarish to a circular form in the vertical axis of the bottle. After a meticulous detail-driven design development with several iteration stages and many glass-specific manufacturing considerations, Envary and Pearl Red completed the design with the evaluation of several appearance models. In conjunction to the bottle, the designers also developed a special edition decanter set, consisting of an artistically made decanter and small shot glasses.