Vicente's Portfolio | Ron Santiago 500

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Project / Branding

Ron Santiago 500

Date

July 01, 2015

Client Name

CubaRon S.A.

Role

Graphic Designer Lead

Team

Luis Isolino Losada Losada – Industrial Engineer

Victor Montoya Torres – Graphics Designer

Alexis Gueddon Gacio – 3D Sketch Designer

General Advisors

Tranquilino Palencia – Rum Master (Ron Santiago S.A)

Julio Ayan Rial – Rum Master (Ron Santiago S.A)

Vicente González – General PM

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The project

This project was developed for Cuba Ron S.A., the largest producer and marketer of rums and liqueurs in Cuba, and it remains one of the most ambitious industrial and commercial ventures I have taken part in. From the outset the company had a clear ambition: “the best product of the Cuban rum industry and one of the best in the world.” The goal was to create its highest-end rum to date, launched to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Santiago de Cuba, the “Cradle of Cuban Light Rum.” We approached it as integral design, covering the visual identity and its campaign applications as well as the bottle and its complete packing system. The result earned several awards, including the Grand Prize of Cuba’s Industrial Design Awards in 2016 for the bottle and its packaging.

The product

Ron Santiago de Cuba 500 Aniversario is the highest-quality rum produced in Cuba today, a Premium spirit within the “prestige” range. Together with Havana Club MÁXIMO, it is regarded as one of the crown jewels of Cuban Light Rum by its creator, the great Rum Master Tranquilino Palencia Struch. Conceived as a tribute to the 500th anniversary of the founding of Santiago de Cuba by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1515, this “Siglo V” is a work of the science and art of Santiago’s Rum Masters, dedicated with love to the city and its history as “the authentic treasure of Cuban rum.”

Designing a Jewel

The branding concept began with research into the history and culture of rum in Santiago de Cuba, seeking to understand the city’s roots and its long connection to the spirit. From there we developed proposals that reflected that cultural essence, exploring symbols and colors that evoke the city, its geography, its traditions and its people, and especially the legacy of Don Emilio Bacardí Moreau, one of the great promoters of the local rum culture. The final proposal was built around the following features and conceptual nuances:

The bottle

The bottle’s diamond shape reflects the purity and elegance of a product handcrafted from natural raw materials, sugar cane from the fields of eastern Cuba, from whose essence this exceptional rum is born. Its most meaningful detail is conceptual: “the diamond is not the form but the content.” The diamond is the empty space inside the bottle, expressing that the real jewel is the rum itself. The bottle is crowned by a cap inspired by the “troneras” of the old Morro San Pedro de la Roca Castle, an iconic World Heritage symbol of Santiago de Cuba.

The Case

To protect this relic, we drew on the legacy of Don Emilio Bacardí Moreau, the pioneer whose work laid the foundations of Cuban Light Rum. A devotee of Egyptology, Bacardí was fascinated by early-20th-century theories on the pyramid’s exceptional qualities, so much so that he designed his own tomb as a pyramid, where he and his wife rest in Santiago’s Santa Ifigenia cemetery. That story inspired a pyramid-shaped case with three faces, each bearing the city’s coat of arms and representing one of Santiago’s historical stages: the colonial era, the period after the 1959 Revolution, and the city of the future beyond its 500 years. Inside, the bottle is accompanied by two gold-stamped Murano glasses and a parchment with its official registration, dedicated and hand-signed by the Master Rum Maker who created it.