Case study
Four thousand cans, two days, one launch date.
Adidas and Molly-Mae needed a drink that read as the trainers. We developed both recipes, canned them ourselves and delivered into four retail destinations for the drop.
4,000 cans
Four retail destinations
Adidas x Molly-Mae. Four thousand branded cans developed, filled and delivered into four retail destinations inside a two day window.
The project
By the numbers.
The brief
Two trainers, two colourways, two drinks.
The commission came through the experiential agency Hessian Events, working on the Adidas x Molly-Mae trainer launch. The creative idea was sharp and easy to state: you are either an iced matcha kind of girl or an iced latte kind of girl.
Two trainers, two personalities, two colourways, and the drinks had to carry the same split. That made colour non negotiable. The deep green of an iced matcha and the soft cream of an iced latte were not flavour choices, they were the visual shorthand for the whole campaign.
The cans had to read as the shoes at a glance. On a shelf, in a photograph, in a story, at thumbnail size.
The constraint
A perishable product with a fixed launch date.
Four thousand cans had to reach a spread of retail destinations for a single launch date: the Adidas flagship in London, Selfridges at the Trafford Centre, and JD Sports in both Manchester and London.
This was not one venue with one bar. It was a national retail drop with a date that could not move, carrying a product that spoils.
That single fact shaped everything. Produce too early and the drinks are past their best when the doors open. Produce too late and they miss the launch entirely. The whole job lived inside a narrow window, and the window was the brief.
What that meant in practice
- A two day production run, worked on twelve hour rotation shifts
- Recipes signed off well ahead, so no development time was spent inside the window
- Chilled delivery routed to four destinations in two cities
What we designed
Recipes matched to a colourway.
We develop drinks in our own studio, which is why a brief like this one is possible. Both recipes were built to hit a colour first and taste correct second, then adjusted until they did both.
An iced matcha that photographs as the right green is not the same drink as an iced matcha that tastes right on its own. Getting both took several rounds in the studio before anything went near a can.
We are not a promotional merchandise supplier putting a logo on someone else’s drink. We wrote the recipes, filled and seamed the cans ourselves, and that is what made the deadline survivable.
The production run.
Delivered
What we delivered.
Two recipes, colour matched. Iced matcha and iced latte developed in our studio to read as the two trainer colourways, then signed off before the production window opened.
A two day run. Four thousand 250 ml cans filled and seamed in house on twelve hour rotation shifts, against a launch date that could not move.
Four destinations. Chilled delivery into the Adidas flagship in London, Selfridges at the Trafford Centre, and JD Sports in Manchester and London.
The result
The drinks were part of the campaign, not merchandise.
Adidas search demand rose 51 per cent after the collaboration, and the cans appeared throughout the launch coverage.
In short
What did Drink Differently produce for the Adidas x Molly-Mae launch?
We produced 4,000 branded 250 ml cans for the Adidas x Molly-Mae trainer launch, commissioned through the experiential agency Hessian Events. The campaign idea split the audience between iced matcha and iced latte, matching the two trainer colourways, so colour accuracy came before everything else. We developed both recipes in our own studio to read correctly as the two colourways and taste right in the can, then filled and seamed the entire run in house across a two day production window on twelve hour rotation shifts. Because the drinks are perishable and the launch date was fixed, the window was the constraint that set the whole schedule. The cans were delivered chilled into four retail destinations: the Adidas flagship in London, Selfridges at the Trafford Centre, and JD Sports in Manchester and London. Adidas search demand rose 51 per cent after the collaboration.
By Mr Flavour. Drink Differently is the creative drinks agency of Mr Flavour, rated 5.0 from 86 Google reviews. The work was first published on the Mr Flavour site: Read the Mr Flavour case study.
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