Karuizawa 1960 / Prestige Packaging for the World's Rarest Japanese Whisky
Some projects arrive with the weight of history already built in. Karuizawa 1960 was one of them.
Japan's smallest distillery closed its doors in 2000, leaving behind a finite and extraordinary legacy. When Cask No. 5627, laid down in 1960, was discovered, it yielded just 41 bottles of what would become the oldest and rarest Japanese whisky in the world. The question we had to answer was a good one: how do you present something this significant to the world?
As 3D Artist and Design Director on this project, I led the exploration of product design concepts in three dimensions. Using 3D allowed us to really dig into form, proportion, and materiality long before a single physical prototype was made, and that process was at the heart of shaping the final look and feel of the release. It meant we could push ideas further and arrive somewhere genuinely special.
The design drew deeply on Japanese craft tradition. Each of the 41 bottles was named after a traditional netsuke, those wonderful miniature Japanese sculptures, and came with handcrafted presentation cases modelled on Japanese puzzle boxes. Two labels of handmade washi paper sit perfectly aligned on each bottle, one hand-pressed and hot metal branded by a craft printer in Scotland, the other with fine art calligraphy applied in Japan.
All 41 bottles sold before the official release. Today they regularly break auction records, achieving more than 30 times their original retail price, including a world record sale of £363,000. It's a project I'm incredibly proud to have been part of.
