Every Tết brief arrives with an animal attached to it. Tết falls on 6 February in 2027 and the animal for the year is the goat, so every pack made for that season had to settle the same question, and the answer shapes the pack more than the choice of red does. The animal is the most obvious move available, and on a shelf where every other brand makes the same move in the same week, the obvious one is the easiest to overlook.
A tiger as heraldry
Imperial Blue’s limited-edition carton for Tết 2022, the Year of the Tiger, started from a plain observation: the shelf that week would be full of tigers. We kept the animal and changed how it was drawn, borrowing from heraldry. A symmetrical pair flank the brand’s crest, so the carton reads closer to a coat of arms than to a zodiac picture. Behind them a pattern of tigers in gold outline repeats, and only one of them is filled in red, which is all the eye needs to find a place to rest. The material was embroidery on silk, and the same lockup then moved from the carton to point-of-sale material, key visuals and the launch campaign.
A dragon found in the brand’s own shape
Ballantine’s guidelines treat the chevron as a shape lifted from the bottle that is never decorated, so for Tết 2024, the Year of the Dragon, a dragon could not be drawn over it. We went the other way round, because a dragon is covered in scales and a chevron is a scale. The Ballantine’s pack tiles the chevron at brand scale, facets it until it catches the light, and only at the end lets the pattern resolve into a dragon’s face. Both tiers of the range, Finest and the 18, share that construction and differ in material.
Two ways in
The two routes run in opposite directions. Imperial Blue brought the animal into the brand’s visual language, here its crest and the conventions of heraldry, while Ballantine’s found the animal already present in the brand’s own geometry. In both cases the pack stayed recognisably the brand’s, and the animal was settled as part of a system before any single surface was drawn. That is why the Imperial Blue lockup could travel from a carton to a launch campaign without being redone.
What the goat asks
A goat offers no pattern as ready-made as a dragon’s scales, so the first job on a goat brief is to ask what the brand already owns that could carry it, and the second is to decide how literal the animal is allowed to be. Vietnam also keeps its own zodiac. The year is Mùi, the goat (dê), and two other animals differ from the Chinese list, the cat in place of the rabbit and the buffalo in place of the ox, so artwork carried over from a regional programme can arrive with the wrong animal.
The calendar for a pack of this kind is set out in the nine-month playbook, and Tết packaging built from the brand’s own geometry follows two more packs, Royal Salute and Aberlour, that found the festivity inside the identity.
