Process Work
What is Esprit de Cork?
Esprit de Cork is a mulled holiday wine set that I created for a Package Design project. Esprit de Cork comes with a bottle of Pinot Noir red wine, a bottle of nutmeg, cinnamon sticks, whole allspice, and star anise, ginger cookies, and a recipe card, all placed in a reusable hand-made wooden box.
The goal of this project was to create a package design that could be reused and/or recycled, and would be a holiday gift one could mail to someone else. Although the spice containers are plastic bottles, the final packaging is both recyclable and reusable. I designed the final packaging as a beautiful, engraved, wooden wine box, that could be brought out during the holiday season.
Word List and Logo Exploration
When coming up with the name of the brand, I created multiple word lists that were based off of holiday, wine, and box-related words. I wanted the name to be something clever and something that brought together the idea of a gathering/party and wine. The name Esprit de Cork is a play-on-words of the French saying Esprit de Corps which is translates to “group spirit”. The word “Corps” is changed to “Cork” to reference the wine.
The logo was drawn in a quick-drawing exercise in class where we were to quickly draw multiple logo thumbnails in less than a minute per thumbnail. The logo is a cork with a gift bow, as the product is a gift itself.
Package Design
Branding and Prototype Sketches
The branding for Esprit de Cork is graphic and elegant. The packaging itself is a wooden box that perfectly holds the contents inside. The recipe card has graphic images of the spices to make the design more fun and festive.
When it came to designing the wooden box, I drew many prototype sketch ideas, and then created small prototypes out of recycled cereal box containers. I originally wanted to create a box based off antique Tiffany Tea boxes, but the time restraint on the project made me decide to design a basic box with top-opening lid. The box would still keep it’s classy charm by having the logo engraved into the lid instead of paper wrapping or vinyl sticker.
After deciding what kind of package design I wanted to create for Esprit de Cork, I began taking measurements of the products inside and created a layout of all the size requirements.
Building the Packaging
For the wooden box, I used a natural thin cut wood that was laser-cut into different pieces to be assembled into a box. The logo was laser-cut engraved into the top of the lid.
Each piece of the box was varnished multiple times with mahogany red wood varnish and left to dry overnight.
After the pieces were fully dried, the box was glued together with Gorilla Wood glue. The box pieces were held tightly together with clamps so that the wood glue would not expand and separate each edge of the container. The hinges and corner pieces were screwed on with tiny wood screws, and the lid is secured with a leather strap and a lock. The bottle fits precisely into the space and the spice containers fit with a small amount of room.
