The Balvenie Taps Into Art To Craft A New Audience For Scotch

Forbes

14-04-2025

Designer Samuel Ross debuted a new structural installation called 'Transposition" with Scotch maker ... More The Balvenie, the latest example of a liquor purveyor leaning into art for brand building.
When designer Samuel Ross visited The Balvenie last year, the designer found himself submerged in Scottish landscapes filled with open lakes and rivers that all seemed to point directly at the distillery.
'And from that moment, I knew there'd be a factor and focus on water,' Ross tells me during an interview. The trip helped inspire a new immersive, structural installation called 'Transposition,' which debuted earlier this month at Milan Design Week.
The artwork features three towers, incrementally rising by 15% in height from the smallest to to the tallest, and each churning through more than 50,000 liters of cascading water per hour. Ross used 1.5 tons of copper-painted steel to build the three vertical rivers, a nod to the copper stills used in the Scotch whisky-making process. Both The Balvenie and Ross say they wanted the piece to have its own identity and not be a to-on-the-nose branding activation.
'He was able to create something we thought was pretty amazing that had whisky making at its absolute heart,' Andrew Furley, global brand managing director of The Balvenie, tells me during a separate interview.
A Balvenie whisky tasting, held in the distillery's home in Dufftown during Ross' visit, would also influence the British-Caribbean artist. 'The sweetness and the profile drew me initially,' says Ross, who personally prefers dark spirits like whisky and rum. 'My objective was to pull on the strands and the profiles of that tasting experience, and the level of depth and character in that process, and transform it into a physical sensory experience.'
Liquor brands have long sought to work closely with artists and designers to broaden their appeal, a trend that began in the 1980s when Andy Warhol created a piece based on the silhouette of a bottle of Absolut vodka.
These partnerships can give spirits makers vibrant new ways to engage with consumers and stand out on the shelf. Most artist-liquor tie ups tend to result in limited-edition bottle creations, including tequila maker Don Julio's creation with designer Willy Chavarría, Scotch brand Johnnie Walker's Lunar New Year design with visual artist James Jean, and a collaboration between brandy St-Rémy and French artist Lucas Beaufort. All of those partnerships debuted over the past two years.
The artwork features three towers, which incrementally get higher by 15% from the smallest to the ... More tallest, and each churn through more than 50,000 liters of cascading water per hour.
Furley says the artistic activation with Ross reflects a recent focus by The Balvenie to seek out opportunities to raise global awareness of a Scotch brand that isn't as well known as rivals like Johnnie Walker or Macallan. Past partnerships that point to The Balvenie's thinking include initially launching The Balvenie Fifty First Edition exclusively at the London luxury department store Harrods and a furniture collaboration with designer Bill Amberg.
While luxury is a persistent theme through all those branding exercises, The Balvenie says it is also angling to become more than just a Scotch sold to collectors and industry insiders.
'The Balvenie has been a 'if you know, you know' brand; it's very well known by whisky connoisseurs and enthusiasts, but not by the more general audience,' says Furley. 'I think what we are trying to do is give ourselves a little more of a shop window to a broader audience who maybe don't know the brand as well as some of those connoisseurs.'
Born in Brixton, an area of South London, Ross says he was primarily raised in the midlands in a part of England that was historically known for shoemaking. That helped inform his preference to work with raw materials when he studied graphic design and illustration at De Montfort University. Industrialism is a through line that consistently appears in his work, ranging from the luxury sportswear brand A-Cold-Wall that he founded in 2014 and work that sits in the permanent collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
'Over the past ten years, I've just been chiseling out and refining that proposition,' says Ross.
British-born designer Samuel Ross says he was raised in an industrial region and that industrialism ... More and raw materials are a through line that consistently appears in his work.
Ross has designed wearable objects for luxury giant LVMH Group, athletic gear purveyor Nike and tech behemoth Apple. 'We're looking to learn from the best,' says Ross, of the partners he works with, which now includes The Balvenie.
'As a custodian of commercial products, and also expression in the arts, I want to understand and have a fair exchange with these parties," adds Ross. "To give them a new context, that's my role as an artist. But also, with a founder hat on, I want to learn how these maisons work and exchange ideas.'
For 'Transposition,' Ross says he sought to sensorially represent the whisky-making process. Each of the three towers represents part of that process: the water, the fermentation process and finally the distilled liquid that goes into a barrel, where it extracts flavor from the wood.
'There's almost this perpetual rhythm of seeing the water and the liquid fall, and you've got the light temperature shifting slightly to give a different optic,' says Ross 'It's all about the senses.'