Serra da Estrela spring water, in a bottle shaped by its sound.

The spring makes a sound long before anyone tastes it. So we drew the sound into the glass.

The brief

The Abrantes family has bottled a naturally sparkling spring above Manteigas since 1971. By 2022 the water was sold in a green plastic bottle with a label from the 1990s, and almost all of it went to cafés in the Beiras: 240 listings, most within an hour of the spring.

Leonor Abrantes, the second generation, wanted the water back in returnable glass and on restaurant tables in Lisbon, Porto and abroad. The new bottle needed a mould, a glassworks and a launch in April, when restaurants set their summer lists.

The idea

We started with a microphone rather than a pencil. At the stone basin where the spring rises, the gas breaks the surface in a slow pulse over a constant hiss of fine bubbles. Everyone in the family could hum it.

We recorded it with a hydrophone, cut 1.4 seconds of it and moulded the waveform once around the shoulder of the bottle. The same line runs on the crates, the neck label and the website, and the launch film has no music, only the spring.

What we made

Identity and wordmark
Returnable glass bottle, 25 cl and 75 cl, with moulded waveform
Crates, neck labels and table cards for restaurants
Sound identity and 45-second launch film
Photography direction

Close-up of a wave-shaped relief moulded into the shoulder of a cold teal glass bottle, beaded with condensation — The shoulder, 75 cl bottle.

Sound you can hold

The waveform is 0.6 mm deep: enough to feel under a thumb, and shallow enough to come through twenty-five trips in the washer. It took three mould samples to get there.

How the mark moves

The wordmark lands like water poured into a glass: a short fall, one ripple, then still. The same curve opens the launch film and every social clip.

Teal glass bottles in two sizes, a wooden crate, neck labels and a table card laid out on a granite slab — The set for restaurants: two bottles, the returnable crate, the neck label and the table card.

Clear water running over grey granite at a mountain spring in morning mist, a teal glass bottle on the stone — From “Nascente”, the launch film. Every sound in it was recorded at the spring or in the bottling hall.

What changed

new restaurant and hotel listings in the first year
In Lisbon, Porto, Madrid and London, on top of the 240 cafés that already stocked it.
bottles sold in the first year
All in glass. The plastic line was retired the same summer.
export markets opened, Spain and the UK
Both through restaurant distributors who found the bottle before they tasted the water.

Who made it

Orvel

Anjali RaoCreative directionLondon
Tomás FerreiraPackaging designLisbon
Kayode AdebayoLaunch film and soundLondon

With

Client team: Leonor Abrantes, Vasco Quelhas
Glass and moulds: Vidros Mondego, Marinha Grande
Sound recording: Rafael Couto
Film: Kayode Adebayo (director), Joana Brites (camera), Sam Ilori (grade)
Photography: Sofia Amaral

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