PACKAGING DESIGN & PROTOTYPE
SCAD PROJECT (2025)
51 INTERNATIONAL PACKAGING
Redesigning the packaging of a Brazilian liquor for the American market by reworking familiar cultural symbols to position cachaça as both playful and refined.
is the world's best-selling brand of cachaça, a Brazilian liquor made from sugarcane juice that's embedded into everyday culture in the country but remains largely unknown to foreigners.
THE CHALLENGE
Design a low-cost secondary package to introduce cachaça to the North American market by leveraging desirable elements of Brazilian culture that are already part of the public imaginary. The goal is to offer an experience to value-driven consumers, adding cultural and emotional depth to a product that's not meant to be a status symbol, but a home-bar staple.
THE OBJECT
After rounds of ideation and sketching, the chosen concept was the simplest and most cost-effective: a rectangular box that's meant to be disassembled, transforming into a poster and four coasters.
AESTHETIC GOAL
Build a deliberate tension: elegant and restrained on the outside, but full of color and celebration inside, reflecting the mystery and soul of the Brazilian carnaval.
QUIET EXTERIOR
VIBRANT INTERIOR
DIELINE
FINAL PROTOTYPE
PATTERN INSPIRED BY THE SIDEWALKS OF COPACABANA BEACH
BREAKING THE TENSION: AN EXPLOSION OF COLOR
COASTERS DEPICTING ICONIC CARNAVAL CHARACTERS
PORTA-BANDEIRA
RAINHA DE BATERIA
MESTRE-SALA
REI MOMO
OUTCOME
This box positions cachaça as both approachable and culturally rich: respectable on the outside, fun on the inside. Rather than redesigning the bottle, the project proposes secondary packaging as a scalable way to introduce Brazilian identity to new markets and test what narratives and motifs resonate the most in different environments.
KEEP IT GOING
Depending on the market response to this first iteration of story-driven packaging, 51 can create new Brazil-themed illustrations to retain engagement, displaying football, samba, and capoeira, or test more complex box designs - imagined in the ideation process above - if there's an interest in position cachaça as a more premium product.
POSTER DESIGN
