The Coca-Cola Contour Bottle Turns 100 — How Did It Change the World We Live In? | QDaily Business History

By design, by business, or by culture, it may be the most important bottle in history.

Coca-Cola's contour bottle has now been around for 100 years.

For the sake of this bottle, Coca-Cola launched a year-long celebration back in February. In the course of these lavish festivities we have heard the song the company wrote for it, Nobody Like You; seen the exhibition mounted for it, "The Coca-Cola Contour Bottle: An American Icon at 100"; watched the series of 14 ads shot for it; and found an app built around it, along with the 100th-anniversary commemorative book Kiss the Past Hello……

No other bottle has ever been treated this way. Neither have most of the people who have ever lived.

You may be thinking: "Is all this really necessary? It's just a bottle."

This article is here to tell you why the Coca-Cola contour bottle deserves exactly this treatment.

An elegant curve is, in itself, good design

The Coca-Cola contour bottle was born out of a competition.

In 1915, Coca-Cola invited bids from glass bottling plants across the United States, hoping to find "a bottle so distinct from other drink bottles on the market that you could recognize it by touch in the dark, or even spot it in pieces on the ground."

Root Glass Company, a firm in Indiana, won. Its designers drew their inspiration from an illustration of a cacao pod in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The inspiration may have been a cacao pod, but more people later thought the bottle looked like a close-fitting dress on a woman's body, with a hint of allure about it. By the 1920s the contour bottle had picked up a second name: the hobble-skirt bottle.

Once the contour bottle had beaten the other entries, Coca-Cola made further changes. The bottle in the original drawing was too heavy and unbalanced — it could barely stand up — so the company ended up ruling that no bottle could weigh less than 14.5 ounces. It also adjusted the curve itself. The contour bottle went into use in 1916.

Judged on design alone, the contour bottle is the sort of example that belongs in a textbook on packaging.

The curve is handsome and unusual in its own right, and it carries a second meaning: a suggestion of a woman's body. Saying so today may sound close to sexism, but the lines of the human body really can give plain aesthetic pleasure.

Second, the curve made life easier for the person drinking. Set beside an ordinary beer bottle, the contour bottle is easier to carry — grip it where the curve swells out and it sits comfortably in the hand.

Finally, the contour bottle plays a trick on the eye: the liquid inside looks like more than it is.

These qualities made the bottle a rare piece of good design. Years later they were boiled down into three rules for drink-bottle packaging that spread widely among designers.

Here are those three rules again: 1. when you grip the neck, it should never feel as if it might slip; 2. the liquid inside should look like more than it is; 3. the bottle should look distinctive.

The contour bottle helped Coca-Cola win the drinks war

A good design reaches further than the design itself. The Coca-Cola contour bottle is a fine example: it helped the company come out on top in the drinks war of its day.

Before the contour bottle, Coca-Cola came in ordinary liquor bottles. That was because from 1899 onward the company ran a bottling-franchise system — Coca-Cola supplied the syrup, and the bottling plants mixed it with water and poured it into their own bottles, which at the time were mostly liquor bottles.

The franchise system brought Coca-Cola no end of trouble. The worst of it was the endless stream of fakes and imitators.

Much as with the "shanzhai" knockoff culture common in China today, bottling plants dreamed up all sorts of strange drinks: "Koke-Ola," "Coca-Kola," "Coca and Cola." A name that sounded near enough was all it took to pass your drink off as the more popular Coca-Cola — with no need to buy syrup from the company at all, which of course left a very fat margin.

How do you stop a wave of imitation like that? Taste clearly would not do it. Pour Coca-Cola and Pepsi into two identical bottles with no labels and almost nobody can tell which is which.

Labels were not much help either. Master Kong and its knockoff "Kang Shuaifu," Mizone and its knockoff "Yongdong" — Chinese manufacturers have already proved how inventive imitation can be.

That left packaging. As mentioned above: "a bottle so distinct from other drink bottles on the market that you could recognize it by touch in the dark, or even spot it in pieces on the ground."

In 1920, when the contour bottle had completely replaced the old ones, Coca-Cola's net profit reached $4 million. In December 1923 the patent on the old contour bottle expired and the company filed a new one. After that, whatever changed — the sizes, small adjustments to the curve, even the switch to plastic — nothing ever left that curved design behind.

By 1949, a survey found that more than 99% of Americans could identify Coca-Cola from the shape of the packaging alone. The contour bottle had become a synonym for Coca-Cola itself.

Not just a bottle: it became part of fashion and art

In 2009, Coca-Cola staged a charity event in Milan and invited designers from Fendi, Moschino, Versace and other houses to design patterns for the contour bottle. At the Spring/Summer 2010 Milan Fashion Week that followed, the bottles were blown up to human size, dressed in the designers' creations and sent down the runway.

That remains the grandest Coca-Cola contour bottle fashion show yet. Beyond it, we have seen Karl Lagerfeld design "clothes" for the bottle, printing his own likeness on it and treating it as a model. The fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier made a design called "Night & Day," built on the fishnet and striped looks Madonna made famous, and the jewelry designer Johnny Rocke made a version set with Swarovski crystals.

Contemporary art was never going to let this one go. Andy Warhol made five paintings with the contour bottle at their center; one of them sold for $57.3 million in 2013. In these paintings the bottle repeats over and over until it fills the whole surface, with hardly any artistic technique to speak of. Some have even said they are not original Warhols at all but copies made by his assistants — and that the signature may have been his mother's.

The contour bottle and Coca-Cola are so sought after because they are the best expression of the consumer culture America stands for. Anyone can own one, and it always means cheer and warmth.

Over the past hundred years the contour bottle has repeated itself through advertisement after advertisement, alongside Coca-Cola's distinctive white logo. It has turned up in every setting: at home, at parties, on picnics, in the hands of workers, of students, of soldiers, even of presidents. Coca-Cola's advertising never passed up a single possible occasion, and the bottle became a symbol of the American spirit of freedom and equality.

Andy Warhol once summed this up in his best-known line on the subject: "You can see when you see Coca-Cola on television that the president drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and you can drink Coca-Cola too. The Coca-Cola you drink is the same as everyone else's; no amount of money can buy you a better Coca-Cola than the one the bum on the street is drinking. All the Coca-Colas are the same, and all the Coca-Colas are good."

Images: Zcool Hellorf; Coca-Cola's official website