According to the Ardagh Group, packaging history has been made with the recent launch of a limited edition spirit bottle, where every single bottle is individual. Absolut Unique, a daring concept that has challenged the whole team behind the world famous brand and its packaging, is a limited edition of nearly four million individually designed and decorated bottles. Every bottle in this vibrant and eye-catching collection has a different colour coating and pattern, as well as its own label number, giving consumers and opportunity to choose a personalised and individually packaged product. For Ardagh's team at Limmared, Sweden, the success of the project is considered an innovation high points int he glass factory's longstanding relationship with Absolut, stretching the creative and technical ingenuity of both teams and their suppliers to the extreme and capitalising on their close working relationship. The team soon realised the extreme challenge of the project brief, namely the need to adapt a decoration process that had been engineered to minimise the design variation into something that needed to deliver the exact opposite. "After a few meetings and brain storming sessions, we developed a computerised valve and control system to automatically and continually change colours and spray patterns on the bottles," explained Fredrik Kallqvist, Development Manager. "We also came up with a system to randomly add contrasting colour "splashes" to the bottles during the coating process. In total, 22 colours were used for the coating, five for the splash guns and 16 colours for the 51 pattern types. Mattias Elg, a Quality Management Professor from Linkoping University in Sweden worked out that Absolut could create 94 quintillion bottles (94 times 10 to the 18th power) before two similar ones would appear.
