For the campaign images marketing O/O Brewing’s new beer Muscles, we worked with bodybuilder Joel Lundin, who posed with the bottle in a traditional bodybuilder manner. The label design and campaign is also a humorous nod to an old Swedish advertising campaign for Stena Line’s border shop, showcasing a muscular man carrying two bags of beer with a t-shirt saying ‘Öl byggde denna vackra kropp’ (Beer built this beautiful body). More on the concept behind the beer and label design below.
For Muscles, a strong Imperial IPA, we turned to New York based artist and illustrator Ana Benaroya to continue our series of artist collaborations. One of the reoccuring themes in Benaroya’s work is powerful portraits of people with swelling muscles, engaging in a range of activities such as wrestling, swimming or just plainly showing off.
In a series of expressive works, Benaroya is turning the popularised image of the strong, dominant male on its head by instead portraying muscular women. Seeing that the craft beer scene is still very much dominated by a homogenous group, namely white men, we felt that it would be interesting to use one of these works for the label. In discussion with Benaroya, we selected a painting depicting a woman rendered in blue, with long, black hair, overpowering a pink-coloured man, gasping for air. Unfortunately, this motif was deemed too violent and - as it featured a hint of a female nipple - also breached Systembolaget’s (Sweden’s national alcohol monopoly) ‘no nipple policy’ and was therefore not accepted. The struggle continues. Consequently, a not less powerful, but ultimately less challenging work of Benaroya’s was selected for the label.
