Way Rum: The spirits label built purely on creative ambition

How a collaboration between Avery Dennison and Idem Design pushed the boundaries of premium spirits design

Designer: Idem Design

Printer: Etic.a

Label materials: Fasson® Paper Watermark 120 FSC®

A gold bee lands on a white surface and everything around it shifts. The letterforms beneath it catch the light differently depending on where you stand, the debossed type moving between presence and absence as the angle changes. Way Rum, a creative collaboration between Avery Dennison and Italian design studio Idem Design, begins with that tension and builds everything around it.

The project was conceived as a creative exercise: a fictional premium rum brand, Riserva, developed to explore what's possible when material choice, printing technique, and graphic design are considered together from the start. The collaboration brought together Idem Design, printer Etic.a and glass manufacturers Vetreria Etrusca and Vetropiù srl, with Avery Dennison supplying the material at the heart of it. The goal was to ask a seemingly simple question. How far can a label go when every decision serves the whole?

The bee sits at the centre of the answer. Rendered in gold foil with great detail, its wings, body and legs picked out with care, it functions as both symbol and technical centrepiece. Beneath it, WAY RUM is debossed in oversized letterforms across the full face of the label, visible through the bee and shifting with the light. “We wanted to build a label where relief, light and perception were in constant dialogue,” says Flavio Sisto, Art Director at Idem Design. “The bee became the anchor of the entire composition — a design that reveals itself differently depending on how you look at it.”