Priory Vodka

The brief

Priory Farm grow their own potatoes in Yorkshire and make vodka from them. In 2017 they had the vodka and no brand, and it was going on a shelf next to the big names. The farm had to come through on everything it went on, with the bottle still the hero.

The approach

The mark is an arch of blocks over the name. It comes from the Priory itself, a twelfth-century house where nuns once lived, and it works on its own as an icon, in a document or as a profile picture. On the bottle the name runs tall under it, and that tall lockup on a narrow bottle is the constraint everything after it had to fit inside.

Around it, Priory Blue, a cool grey and black, set in Trajan and Playfair Display. Then the textures to shoot it against: hessian sacks, crate wood and soil from the field, so every photograph has some link to the farm and the product is still what you look at.

What was done

The supporting graphics carry the handmade part. A quality stamp that reads A handcrafted spirit, proudly distilled, filtered and bottled in Yorkshire, and an illustrated potato sack drawn to sit behind it. The stamp works in one colour, so it goes on glass as well as paper.

Then the kraft business cards, and the brand guidelines, version 1.0, dated November 2017, so anyone Priory brought in later could apply it without guessing: the mark and its clear space, the colours, the type, and what not to do with any of it.

And the everyday end of it: a hessian tote, the stamp pressed into wood, the letterhead and the swing tags. From 2020 the range grew into sixteen flavoured vodkas, limoncello, two cocktail cans and a gift box, then a gin and a rum on the same label system. Every one of them still carries the arch.