Coming of age of Old Tallinn
Here’s a peak into evolution of Vana Tallinn, the mighty Estonian drink, design and package copy.
Visual differences between the old and the new are obvious and need no analysis by a non-design guy. Copy offers more insight into the brains of brand managers. The back label of the old bottle starts off with For over a quarter century Liviko’s Vana Tallinn has met with favour not only in Estonia but in Russia and Northern Europe, roughly translating into Hey, we really wouldn’t try to sell you this weird strong liquour if Finns and Russians didn’t buy it for reasons unknown to us. The new version is slightly more confident, implicitly stating: it’s what we in Estonia drink, take it or leave it. The old bottle suggests mixing with cream or sparkling wine (I got a headache just from writing this sentence), new one leaves more room for expirements: excellent ingredient for various cocktails.
Another addition is appreciation of craftsmanship which just jumps out of the newest reincarnation of Vana Tallinn. This genuine liquour has been created by Estonian Craftsmen. Based on one hundred years of experience. Are you picturing oak barrels and red-faced men with aprons mixing secured ingredients yet? The old bottle was much less romantic, just stating the aforementioned “over a quarter century”. However, the Estonian copy on the same label says that Vana Tallinn has been enjoyed from 1960 onwards, leaving me slightly confused. It’s either that the English copy was translated in 1985 and was never touched since or that the translator sought too much inspiration from the product at hand.
Many thanks to Alex and Kaisa for the great dinner on their roof terrace where this piece of history unfolded. Here’s to ice-cream with Vana Tallinn for desert!
Artificially limiting supplies to drive prices up was a good start. Coming up with outrageous legends about spices and the dangers that spice harvesters had to face was simply genius. Herodotus writes of Arabic merchants that claimed that the only way to get cinnamon was to pick a fight with some huge aggressive birds who made their nests from these aromatic sticks. If you wanted cinnamon you had to slaughter a cow, cut it to pieces and leave the meat on the bottom of the mountain where the birds lived (and of course hide very quickly). The gluttonous birds would then fetch all the meat they could carry back to their nests, which at some point would break under the weight of the meat and roll downhill to be picked up by the brave cinnamon harvesters. Or take frankincense that supposedly came from trees guarded by flying snakes (as if crawling snakes weren’t bad enough). The only way to get access to the precious incense was to first smoke another incense that the snakes didn’t like and then do the harvesting faster than lightning.
I got back from a weekend snowboarding trip in Laax a week ago. With plenty of fresh powder around I spent most of the trip off piste. How very enjoyable.
The main keynote speaker was a star only outshined by The Killers: Seth Godin presented nuggets of wisdom from his latest book called 
Next up Wired founder John Battelle made an interesting point that e-commerce and online marketing wise we’re at “fish with feet” stage in evolution. The days of socially isolated purchases that are tied to desktop or good old shoppe on the corner are over (ie. we’re not relying on swimming only anymore) but we haven’t quite figured out what to do with mobile web, location data and people expressing their intentions in a social fashion. In 5-10 years we’ll do things differently, just that no-one knows how exactly.
I spent the last two days in Prague at our annual company meeting – slides, beer, little sleep and many conversations. A presentation session I very much enjoyed was a talk by Ben Hunt-Davis, 2000 gold medalist from the Sydney Olympic games. Ben shared his story of winning the ultimate sports trophy in Men’s Eight race, starting out as little more than an above average rower. The man certainly knows a thing or two about winning.