The Botanist · Educational toolkit · Brand ambassador network
Redesigning The Botanist Gin’s brand ambassador education kit, a travel-ready box of 22 Islay botanical tinctures and a deck of botanical cards, taken from brief through to production.
Marine plywood box with laser-etched lid – Cinema 4D render
01 / The Problem
The Botanist Gin’s brand ambassador programme already had a tincture box. The problem was that nobody wanted to carry it.
The original kit was built around a heavy, solid-wood case – beautiful on a shelf, impractical in an overhead locker. Ambassadors were either leaving it behind or shipping it ahead, which undermined the whole point of a hands-on educational tool.
The brief was straightforward: redesign it so the brand ambassadors could actually travel with it.
02 / Context
The Botanist is built around a single, specific idea: 22 Islay botanicals, hand-foraged from the land surrounding the distillery, each one contributing something distinct to the final spirit. Getting that idea across in a tasting room or at a bar relies entirely on the person doing the explaining – and on the quality of what they have to show for it.
The original box carried the right contents. It just couldn’t go where the ambassadors needed to go. Weight and bulk were the limiting constraints, and any redesign had to solve those without stripping out the premium feel that made the kit worth having in the first place.
03 / The Redesign
The redesign started with the material. Laser-cut plywood gave precise, repeatable construction at a fraction of the weight of the original solid timber. Every component – the body, the inner locator shelf, the lid – was engineered from laminated plywood sheet, keeping the weight down while retaining the warmth and craft of a physical, hand-finished object.
The inner shelf was the structural heart of the redesign. It holds 24 tincture bottles (30ml each) in fixed positions, preventing movement in transit without adding bulk. The lid closes flush and carries laser-cut Botanist branding – functional identification, but also the first thing someone sees when the box is opened in front of them.
Cinema 4D was used throughout the design process to validate dimensions, material choices, and the visual language before committing anything to production.
Laser-cut locator shelf – 24 bottle positions
04 / The Lid
The original design used a conventional hinged lid with a magnetic closure. When the production costs came back, the mechanism alone made the unit price unworkable.
The constraint forced a rethink. The solution was a sliding lid in the style of a domino box – no hinges, no magnetic closer, nothing that needed a specialist to fit. Simpler to produce, cheaper to manufacture, and structurally more robust in transit.
It also did two things the hinged version couldn’t. Removing the lid surface exposed the edge-on laminate of the marine plywood, which became a considered detail rather than something to hide. And the lid itself, standing upright on the table while the box was in use, acted as a branded display – The Botanist wordmark facing outward while the ambassador was working through the tasting.
The sliding lid
The sliding lid upright as a branded display, box open and ready for use
05 / Kit Contents
Each kit contains:
24 tincture bottles (30ml) – The 22 Islay botanicals used in The Botanist, plus raw unfinished spirit – giving ambassadors the before and after of the distillation process in a single session.
22 botanical cards – A full deck, one card per botanical. Each card carries a description of the plant and its role in the gin, alongside photography of the plant in its natural Islay habitat. The cards work as a guided tasting sequence or as a reference set – useful in a one-to-one conversation or in a group masterclass format.
The box’s contents
Tincture bottle with the deck of 22 botanical cards
Botanical cards plant photography and Latin names
Card detail – Apple Mint
06 / Making It
The shift from solid timber to engineered sheet material was the critical decision. Laser-cut plywood gave precise, repeatable construction at a fraction of the weight of the original – keeping the warmth and craft of a hand-finished object without the bulk.
The inner locator shelf holds all 24 bottles in fixed positions, no padding required. The lid closes flush, carrying laser-cut Botanist branding – the first thing someone sees when the box is opened in front of them. Every component was hand-finished and hand-packed.
First prototype of the sliding lid design, with red laminate locator shelf
07 / Outcome
Around 50 kits were produced and distributed across The Botanist’s global ambassador network, reaching markets across Europe, North America, South America, Asia, South Africa, and Australia. Each one went out fully stocked and ready to use – no assembly, no separate shipping of contents.
08 / Reflection
This project sits slightly apart from the digital work in this portfolio, but the design problem is the same kind: something exists, it doesn’t quite work as intended, understand why, then fix it without breaking what was already good.
The tincture box was already a strong educational concept. It just needed to travel.
Bruichladdich · Educational product design
Twenty papercrete prototypes, trialled in Tokyo hotels, designed to get cask-strength drinkers to add water.
