3 Bets Tequila Brands Make on Their Bottles (and on You)

The tequila aisle at a good liquor store can include dozens, or even hundreds, of options. And in many cases, your first impression is what gets you to purchase.

In tequila, bottles and labels (collectively, “packaging”) work very hard.

There is a famous, tall blue and white ceramic bottle. There are green glass bottles. Bottles with unique stoppers on top. Plain glass bottles that could just as easily contain wine, rum, or vodka.

If you stand there and gaze for a minute, you just might be astonished at the full gamut of tequila packaging.

Every one of those bottles and labels is a decision somebody made, usually long before you walked in the store. The decision gets called design, which makes it sound like a matter of taste. It is closer to a wager.

A brand has just a few seconds and a few square inches to tell you why it deserves $45, or $70, or $150 or more, and it has to choose how to clearly signal that value.

Some brands bet you should see the tequila, that the color of the liquid gives you the information you seek. Other brands do the opposite, cloaking the tequila itself in opaque bottles. And then there are brands that focus more on words than pictures, telling you what’s in the bottle as much as showing you.

The Tequila Report asked seven brands to explain their choice, how it helps their brand, and who they’re trying to convince (and of what) with their design decision. We also asked a retailer what happens when shoppers actually meet those bottles.

Casa Obsidiana Tequila is a new brand and uses extraordinary ceramic bottles, hand-made in Mexico, with inset polished obsidian stones taken from the agave fields near Tequila, the town. This is as much art as it is packaging, and that’s no accident.

The brand is a collaboration between the Beckmann family, with eight generations of tequila experience, and Jean-Charles Boisset, a significant figure in French and California wine.

LeighAnn Campbell, Regional Director of Spirits for Boisset Collection, describes these bottles as a set of deliberate references: "the connection to the land, hence the colors, the materials, and the obsidian stones from the agave fields; the connection to the people that create it, …and the connection to the craftsman of our region that polish the stones, and make the bottles by hand."

Humano Tequila, meaning “human”, is also a newer brand that chose ceramic bottles, and its logic is almost the opposite of heritage.

Luis Abundis, co-founder and CEO, wanted the bottle to break with the shape the category has used for a century, and to speak to a buyer most tequila brands ignore.

"We wanted packaging that was modern, clean, easy to grab, and that also spoke to a female market, not just the male market like most brands you see on the shelves," he says.

Lined up, the bottles are meant to look like figures. "If you see our bottles together, they look like little Humans, and we decided to go with unusual colors, with a different color for every bottle to represent how we are all the same, but different at the same time."

For both of these brands that use ceramic instead of glass, there is a cost. Yes, financially, as the packaging (especially Casa Obsidiana’s) costs many dollars per bottle.

The manufacturing is a separate problem. Abundis says the expense of ceramic was not the hard part. "The challenge was not the cost per bottle, but really creating a mould and the engineering required to make it work from a functional standpoint."

But there’s another, perhaps larger, cost.

You cannot see into the bottle.

Everything a tequila's appearance might communicate, color from a barrel, clarity, the shift between reposado and añejo, is unavailable the moment a brand chooses an opaque vessel.

Both of these brands responded the same way: they moved color from the liquid to the outside of the bottle, giving each expression its own shade. The bottle itself now carries the signal the tequila used to carry.

But this bold choice is one both brands would make every time.

"If Humano were sold in a regular bottle, I think we would lose our identity," Abundis says. "Our packaging is part of our story."

Campbell put it in similar terms: "We feel we'd lose the essence of the brand itself. The vessel communicates the quality and care we take to create the tequila inside."

For a brand you might not have heard of yet, the wager is that the bottle will do the recommending, assuming there’s no sales clerk around to explain.

"A dramatic bottle earns you the three-second shelf decision, the gift purchase, maybe faster traction in retail where nobody's there to tell your story," says Todd Hummel, co-founder of Elevación 1250 Tequila. "Packaging absolutely moves bottles in this category. I'd be lying if I said otherwise."

Hummel still chose clear glass and a thin strip of label, for a specific reason.

Elevación 1250's flagship expression is a rosa, rested in ex-Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, and it comes out of the wood with a blush hue the brand cannot get any other way.

"That color IS our packaging," Hummel says. "A clear, simple bottle, along with a strategic label design and placement, puts it on display; an ornate one would compete with it."

His approach: "the bottle should be a window, not a costume."

Hummel is candid that the choice began as a constraint. The brand bootstrapped its origin, every dollar was allocated, and he put the money into production with distiller Iliana Partida and into barrels rather than fancy bottles.

He argues the constraint clarified the brand instead of limiting it. "Novelty gets someone to try you once; liquid gets them to buy you twice.”

Valor Tequila arrives at the same simple, clear glass bottles from somewhere else entirely.

Founder and CEO Christiane Maertens did not choose a plain bottle to show off a color. She chose it because the packaging is part of a supply-chain position.

"Por gente buena, para gente buena (“for good people, by good people”) is the reason Valor exists, and the bottle should be honest about what's inside it," she says. “Ours is understated because we wanted the liquid and the values behind it to be the reasons someone comes back."

Asked what a flashier bottle would gain her, Maertens allows that it would probably pick up shoppers who currently walk past. But there are trade-offs.

"A flashier bottle tends to narrow your sourcing options. Our bottles are 100% recycled glass, produced in Guadalajara, and all of our packaging is sourced within Jalisco. An equitable supply chain includes the packaging, which means the money stays where the product is actually made."

Two standard bottles. One is plain so you can see the tequila. The other is plain so the glass can be made 40 minutes from the distillery. Packaging restraint, like packaging emphasis, is a decision made for multiple reasons.

A third group of tequila brands treats the bottle as a textbook.

Socorro Tequila put its simple ingredients on the skinny label that encircles the bottle neck.

"Last year, the CRT (Consejo Regulador del Tequila, the Mexican regulatory authority) approved us putting 'Agave. Water. Yeast.' on our neck label, echoing our Socorro slogan, 'Agave. Water. Yeast. That's it,'" says Brian Ashcraft, Director of Marketing at I & A Agave Spirits.

The slogan itself was not approved. "While the phrase 'That's it.' wasn't approved for the label itself, we could still convey the ingredients while working within the CRT's labeling guidelines,” he recalled.

For the new Socorro Tequila Blanco 110 Singular Edición, a still-strength blanco at 55% ABV, and minimally filtered, the brand wanted to include on the bottle label as much verified production information as is legally possible.

Ashcraft calls it radical transparency. "Tequila makers have shared production information in the past, but it's typically found on websites, through QR codes, or in interviews. The real challenge is putting that level of transparency directly on the bottle itself."

Arriesgado Tequila takes a similar approach to extensive production information on the label, but for a different reason. The tequila is made by maestro tequilero Roberto Real in Amatitán using methods that are highly unusual by design, including agave crushed by hand with wooden mallets in a canoa (canoe).

Shawn Miller, chief right brain at PKGD Group, which imports and markets the brand, has no illusions about how many people will read it. "I don't think every consumer is going to read every detail on the label, and that's okay. But if someone wants to know how this tequila was actually made, they don't have to guess."

Notice what these two bottles are not. Neither is a sculpture. Both are clear glass with conventional silhouettes, and neither brand is asking the shape to carry any information.

They solved distinctiveness with information instead of form, which is another way to stand out on the shelf.

"Can I measure whether transparency moves sales? No. I honestly can't," Miller says. "But I'd want that on the bottle whether it sold one more case or not, because it’s what Arriesgado is."

Ashcraft feels the same way. "Even if only a small number of consumers know about the effort behind this transparency project, we believe it was worth doing."

El Viejito is one of the oldest distilleries still operating, and the brand they own (also called “El Viejito”) featured, until a few months ago, packaging that didn’t match up to its pedigree.

Miller, whose company also imports El Viejito, is blunt about the diagnosis. "The previous package simply was not earning the product serious consideration on the shelf."

PKGD pushed for a change, which he describes as a first. "We never exert influence over how a producer makes the liquid or what goes into the bottle. That authority belongs entirely to them. But in this case, it had become obvious that an exceptional tequila from an extraordinary family was being overlooked because of its presentation."

The redesign came with a hard constraint: it could not raise the price. El Viejito offers a noteworthy quality-to-price ratio, so the new packaging had to look better without costing more.

By PKGD's reporting, El Viejito in the United States moved 264 cases across the first half of 2025, roughly 44 cases a month. In the first two months after the new packaging landed, it moved 1,383 cases, roughly 692 a month. Stores and restaurants carrying the brand grew by 296%.

"I would never attribute every case of growth to packaging alone, but the market response strongly validates the decision," Miller says. “The tequila did not need to change. The package needed to help people see what had been there all along."

Brands make these bets from a distance. Roman Romaya watches the outcome every day.

He is the buyer for Old Town Tequila in San Diego, which has perhaps the largest selection of tequila in the United States, and he says customers often walk in with the packaging already decoded. In both directions.

"Most consumers assume that a pretty bottle equals bad tequila in a pretty bottle, and they assume that an overly plain bottle contains cheap tequila that is pretty bad as well."

The same shopper can distrust bottles for opposite reasons.

Which is why Romaya's team doesn't guess. They ask.

"When trying to match a customer with a bottle, we ask what they're looking for and if they're buying it for themselves or as a gift. If it is a gift, what type of recipients are they giving it to? Tequila aficionados, collectors, and so forth."

"Pretty bottles make great gifts, so sometimes it works out. Sometimes you realize that the customer just cares about the tequila itself, not the bottle. Sometimes you get people who care about both."

Packaging is not a measure of tequila quality. It is not even a reliable signal of price. It is certainly not an infallible shortcut to knowing whether the tequila is any good.

Packaging is this: a brand telling you which difference it chooses to emphasize, one that hopefully moves you to buy.

Ceramic gives up the ability to see the liquid product, but gains visual impact.

Plain, clear glass gives up the intrigue, but gains a statement about the juice and their intent.

A label dense with production data gives up simplicity, but gains credibility via transparency.

None of those is the right answer.

There is no right answer.

They are all answers that might be right for the brands that asked the all-important question: "How are we different, and why does the consumer care?"

So the next time you’re looking at a bottle, don’t just consider its beauty, but rather think about what the brand decided to show you, and what it decided you would not need to see.

Casa Obsidiana, Socorro, Arriesgado, and El Viejito are partners of The Tequila Report.