South Downs Water
Natural mineral water branding for a product that hotels and restaurants kept turning down
It was called THE
Industry
Food & Drink
Services
Brand Positoning, Brand Identity, Packaging
Completed at
Ascender
A man who'd been an apprentice at the old ice factory remembered there was a well underneath it. By then the building belonged to a family plastics company, and one afternoon during a tea break he went looking, working through the back store rooms until he found it. Ian Windsor released the capping plate and tasted what came up. That water is sold today as South Downs Water, drawn from an artesian well 420 feet beneath the Sussex and Hampshire border and filtered on the way up by the chalk of the Downs.
In 2013 it was on sale under the name THE. Nobody could work out what that was supposed to mean, and the label was hard to read at any distance. But, the water was never the issue. It's bottled without treatment of any kind, which earns it Natural Mineral Water status, a protected designation most bottled water sold in Britain can't claim.
But the people who decide what goes on a restaurant table were turning it down. Hotel groups, event caterers and venue managers were the customers worth having, and most of them never got as far as tasting anything. A bottle on a table is part of how the room is dressed, so the label was doing the selling, and the label wasn't up to it.
Four hundred and twenty feet of chalk
The answer was already in the ground. Rain falls on the Downs and works its way down through the chalk over years, and the chalk is what gives the water its taste and its mineral content. But the brand didn’t convey any of that.
Purity is what every water brand claims, so it had stopped being something a buyer could hear. What South Downs Water had was a mechanism behind the claim. Describing how the water gets purified through design gives someone a reason to believe it. And it was all in the chalk layers of the South Downs.
So the category got reviewed, the audience analysed, and what a high-end hotel or event expects from a bottle on the table. All three pointed the same way. The position was agreed before any design started, which meant the brief could be written in a line: make the source the first thing anyone reads.
Read across a table
Bottled water packaging design usually assumes a supermarket shelf. This bottle was going to live on restaurant tables and conference tables, read from two feet away in low light by someone who didn't choose it and won't pick it up. Legibility came first, and everything else got arranged around it.
Type was chosen to hold at distance and at small sizes, which is exactly where the old label had failed. Colour separated the range. Logo design ran to three variants, still, sparkling and corporate.
Mineral water label design is mostly a constraint problem. Statutory text, source details and volume all have to fit a curved surface a few centimetres wide, and every one of them is compulsory, which leaves very little room for the name. The old water bottle label design had fitted those in first and given the name whatever was left over. The new one started with the name.
Guidelines followed the same rule. They were written for people who'd never speak to whoever designed them, which for a business supplying venues across the south of England means printers, caterers and venue staff working off a PDF.
A decade on the same label
The identity launched in 2014 and it's still in market, unreplaced, more than ten years on. The range has moved into glass, rPET and cans since, and the bottled water brand identity carried into each new format without being rebuilt.
South Downs Water now supplies Goodwood, Cowdray Park, Boomtown and the Southampton Boat Show, which is the kind of customer base the 2013 brand was losing.
More work
Overtone
