The Morrison family are whisky royalty. For generations they were particularly associated with the island of Islay, where the jewel in the family’s crown was the Bowmore distillery. In the 1990s, they sold their distilleries and focused on whisky trading.

But the distilling habit is a hard one to kick. In 2017, they built a brand-new distillery on a 300-acre farm in Perthshire. It was a serious distillery with serious ambitions: to distil the first whisky in the family for thirty years, for one, but also to elevate and celebrate the story of barley within whisky.

Decades ago, Scotch whisky was invariably made with Golden Promise barley. But in the penny-pinching era of the drinks multinational, most have foregone this beautiful variety in favour of higher-yield Laureate barley. The Morrison family focused their new expression on Golden Promise barley, grown right there on the farm. The result is Aberargie, a genuinely remarkable new malt.

But how should Morrison tell this story? What should the whisky look like? What bottle, what closure, what label? What price-point? What positioning?

I developed the brand strategy for Aberargie, defining its role in the whisky category and in the broader Morrison portfolio of brands.

I helped navigate the cultural shifts that were happening within whisky, and figure out how Aberargie needed to respond to them. Not by being thoroughly traditional and pretending to have a history as a brand that it didn’t really possess; not by being rebelliously modern and disrespecting what had gone before; but rather trying to carve out space as a timeless classic.

I figured out how to tell the story of the farm, the barley, and the wood that make the whisky uniquely characterful.

That overall strategy and story informed everything from the brand visual identity to the bottle shape to the sales strategy.

• A brand positioning and category role
• A trade narrative
• A hierarchy of messaging for consumers
• A creative platform for the brand visual identity and comms