Michelob Ultra Branding & Packaging

We partnered with the Michelob Ultra team at AB InBev to update their brand and packaging line. As a brand with rich history, and great success in recent years, it was important to pay homage, while leaning into what was working. Kudos to that team for recognizing the need for a rebrand at a point when others might have thought that with such success it wasn’t needed.

The partnership was unique in how deeply we worked together, forming multi-day camps in Colorado to understand their active target, and working with professional athletes, influencers, marketers, packaging engineers, and master brewers to inspire the work. We concepted the brand together, dreamed up form factors of new bottle shapes, worked with brand partners on special edition collaborations, tasted experiments from the master brewer, and found unexpected flavors for new product lines. It was a project unlike any other, and as the number three light beer in the world, it’s my largest scale rebrand and packaging to date.

We elongated the ribbon, to find a more iconic shape. We revised and modernized the Michelob script. We introduced an all new typeface for ULTRA, and many of the supporting text. We leaned into white, where the brand was caught between colors. And we fully embraced the target audience within an active lifestyle through every decision made. Side-by-side, the new design is quite different. But what I might be most proud of on this project is the fact that nobody noticed. To me, that says we were authentic to them and wise to carry working elements forward.