Branding the world’s best gin. Stig Bareksten is a highly-distinguished master-distiller and co-founder of Oss Craft Distillery, situated in Bergen, Norway. He has created Bareksten Botanical Spirits, a unique range of craft spirits, including gin, vodka, liqueur, absinthe, whiskey and aquavit. KIND’s task was to create Barekstens complete branding, including visual identity, bottles, labels and advertising. The starting point and the humble aim of the project was to create the world's best gin. To achieve this, we needed to create a brand that was bold, distinctive, and unique. We also wanted to challenge the market-leaders and position Bareksten for the hi-end market. Bareksten represents the essence of Norway – dark, wild, breath-taking, dramatic. Clean flavours inspired by ancient craft traditions are at the very heart of the brand’s ‘botanical wonders’. The liquor is crafted from herbs harvested from the forest, and this was also where we gathered our inspiration for the brand. Influenced by the Nordic fauna and its dark legends, the Bareksten brand became wild, dark and mystical. The bottles have been dyed matte-black and adorned with mysterious skeletal forests. The range consists of four different forests, to help differentiate and let each bottle tell its own mystical story. The illustrations where done in-house at KIND by designer Johannes Blomgren. The forests are gritty and hard, but the finish gives them an exclusive look. The design has successfully positioned Bareksten within the hi-end part of the liquor-marked and gained a high reputation for its distinctive design and flavour, clearly differentiation the product from its competitors. Bareksten Botanical Gin has now become one of the most awarded Gin brands, for both it’s flavour and unique design and has achieved the prestigious title of the world’s best Gin in San Francisco in 2018 along with being Best in Class winner in the category London Dry Gin in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2020.