stopper Design

While developing the brand narrative for Terai, we wrote story ideas, sketched label shapes and elements, drew bottles and closures and explored material palettes all at once.

Our search for the right Terai bottle stopper took us to India's beloved ‘toy town’ Channapatna. Over memorable days of trials, permutations, language-barrier-giggles but also truly amazing collaborative energy with our ally Pooja, we had our perfect design. The Terai stopper has been carefully carved, coated and buffed to a shine by hand in this little dusty hamlet with a huge heart. The ivory wood is backyard-grown, seasoned, hand-carved on simple lathes. Natural tree-sap lacquer mixed with vegetable dyes is used to coat the piece as it spins, a process ever-mesmerising to watch.

Bottle Design

Terai was conceived as a confident, modern, global brand with a strong, deeply rooted, authentic Indian spirit, and the bottle would be the primary touchpoint to express this. Amongst our sketches, a tall, faceted design inspired by hand-carved pillars in ancient Indian architecture and products, was selected for development. Along with Shekhar Swarup and his highly technically experienced team, the shape, dimensions, proportions of the lip, shoulder, body and base were refined and tested over months, achieving the right form, ergonomics and fabrication details.

illustrations

Learning about gin production from the incredible Terai family and distillers, we dived deeper into the world of botanicals— their fascinating Indian histories and symbolism, flavour notes when distilled, the process of tasting, testing, getting them to balance just right. A very special set of vintage Indian coins that we stumbled upon in the Swarup family’s collection, became the inspiration for an illustration of our botanicals. These coins minted in early independent India have a unique visual style, symbolic of Indian pluralism itself. While the overall arrangement, form and typography is quite English, the chunky, bold motifs themselves are reminiscent of Mughal-era paintings, hinting at a collaboration of local painters and Colonial designers of the time. The Terai botanicals have been visually interpreted in a similar way, a hat-tip to that era. They were researched, drawn carefully by hand, then converted with specialised craftsmen to a fine sculptural emboss on the Terai label.