Viva Tequila Seltzer

The brief

A tequila seltzer with a name and nothing else. Build the brand from zero, and find a third position the category didn’t have yet — tequila-credible without being kitsch, mainstream-friendly without being a White Claw clone.

The audience wedge was specific. Not the Truly / White Claw / High Noon party-seltzer crowd. The active, athletic drinker who’d otherwise reach for a Topo Chico Ranch Water, or skip seltzer altogether. Tasty, low-calorie, and not embarrassed to be in someone’s hand.

This is the kind of project I love most: a full brand built from the ground up.

Hero Four flavor cans in a row in beach sand, sky behind. The whole brand promise — sun-bright color, confident wordmark, the agave sunburst — in one frame.

The work

Full brand creation, top to bottom: logo, iconography, typography, brand guide, packaging, advertising, brand swag and collateral. Operating at chief design / creative director level with junior designers under me.

The mark itself does most of the structural work. A clean, condensed sans wordmark — confident, gender-neutral, legible at six feet — paired with a small agave-burst icon that gives the brand its tequila credibility without dressing the can up in cactuses or skulls. Each flavor takes a distinct, fully saturated color from a tightly bounded palette so a four-pack reads as a family before it reads as four flavors.

grass-4_Can — Variety overhead The four cans arranged on grass, showing how the palette behaves as a set. The system in one shot.

Viva-Variety-8-pack — 8-pack variety carton Diagonal multi-color stripes wrapping the box, big VIVA on the front. The brand at retail scale.

Viva-Grapefruit-8-pack — Single-flavor 8-pack (Grapefruit) One color, full panel, tagline in the corner ("Live Long. Live Well. Live It Up."). Restraint at the SKU level.

What I’m proudest of

Two things worth pulling apart.

The packaging is widely loved. The cans landed exactly where they needed to land — in the third space, instantly readable as tequila-credible without leaning on cliché.

The client absorbed the design into their broader standards. They picked elements from the favorite direction and rolled them into communications and advertising standards across the rest of the brand. That’s the part that matters more than the design awards: a client trusting a piece of work enough to extend it into everything else they do.

The role on the site reads as executive consulting — the same framing as Our Cellar — and the agency stays unnamed.