How long does it take to create the world’s most luxurious spirit? Macallan’s heritage dates back over two hundred years. It is the world’s most collected whisky by both value, and is part of Scotland’s most valuable exports, which means there is a lot resting on each bottle of Macallan whisky that leaves the bottling plant.
Personally, I love the new core range redesign. But rebranding your core range and releasing ultra-premium bottles like the £1,100 Time:Space Mastery and the £800 Art is the Flower limited edition would be a bold move even in the best of times. Right now, it feels particularly risky. Many whisky drinkers are facing tighter budgets, secondary market prices have softened, and even Macallan’s parent company, Edrington, reported a 10% slump in core revenue to £912 million in the year to March 2025.
Yet despite the headwinds, Macallan continues to invest in bold, long-term creative work.
I sat down with Jaume Ferràs, Macallan’s Global Creative Director, to find out more about the first luxury whisky, Macallan’s creative process, and why the best designers might not be designers at all.
Luxury Time Scales
I have been part of the whiskey industry for over 10 years now. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have said to a customer who has been waiting over six months for a cask to be moved from Islay, “nothing moves quickly in whisky.” I’ve said it, I understand it, and yet we become blind to it too.
All luxury markets are slow and involved. When you add maturation periods of the whiskey itself on top of the layers of influence and teams of designers, cask masters, marketers—everything takes a long time. Macallan’s early stories in the 1980s may have centered around small teams finding fifty and sixty year old casks of whisky tucked away at the back of a warehouse and deciding to release them. But for Ferràs and his team the stories are different ones.
“We work at least five years ahead,” Ferràs said to me over a zoom call earlier this month. “Product development, cask management, and creative direction all operate on a long-term roadmap.”
The redesign of the core range dates back longer than that even. Triggered by the new distillery and the way Ferràs explains it, it is almost like the distillery and the branding weren’t speaking the same language, and the redesign aims to address that.
“The conversation about our identity really started around seven years ago, triggered by the opening of the new distillery in 2018. We realized that while the distillery had become a permanent, highly visible part of the landscape, the brand identity wasn’t reflecting that. At the same time, we weren’t fully communicating our commitment to Sherry cask maturation, or the fact that we were approaching 200 years of history. Those three factors combined made us step back and reassess the identity of the brand.”
Creating Worlds Of Whisky
The result of seven years of work is a striking core range. It also speaks the same design language as the travel retail set and of the flowing loops of the distillery itself. It also strongly features the rich red that has been part of Macallan’s heritage language since those early days.
I wondered if working for a brand as large as Macallan, defined as it is by its history and years of planning, could be frustrating. But Ferràs said no, that there is “surprising freedom” at Macallan.
“The Macallan is very good at creating worlds. Each collection—Time & Space, Harmony, Home—has its own internal story and ecosystem,” said Ferràs. “We don’t want a new whisky that’s just slightly different—we want it to be part of a whole new world.”
That does give freedom. With each release designed to be more than just a whisky; it is a story. And one that has been crafted to be told long after the bottle itself is empty. “The bottle sits on the table long after the whisky is poured—it’s the design that continues the conversation.”
This then is a train of thought that speaks to my sensibilities too. There are few people in the world who would sit and dissect a painting by discussing the shades of pigment within each brush stroke, instead we sit and we see the stories told by paintings, and in turn the stories of ourselves that they echo. This grounds the experience in memory, making it something we turn back to.
So too, we don’t remember the precise flavours within each sip of whisky. But we do remember the place we drank it, who we were with, the reason it was opened, the weight of a bottle as we poured, or the drip of “wasted” spirit we laughed with a friend over.
These are the parts of the story that are stored in our mind alongside our love of a drink.
The Genius of Outsiders
Storytelling through collaboration is another big thing in whisky at the moment. It is everywhere you look, and at times it can feel like a gimmick. But Ferras explains that it is anything but.
“We want to work with designers who are not designers. Actual bottle designers bring the physics with them—gravity, bottling lines, pouring mechanisms. But sometimes that limits creativity before it starts. That’s where naive creativity comes in… and that naivety can become a breakthrough.
This I understand completely. However, I also feel it is where the disconnect comes in. From a design perspective it makes sense; good design is supposed to push boundaries. From a luxury product side, it is no different than having a $20,000 designer handbag too small to hold your keys or phone, or a $45,000 mechanical watch that loses 2 seconds a day if you don’t remember to wind it properly.
Whisky is not quite either of these things. Not yet. For now it is still a drink, a luxurious drink, but without the complete trappings of haute couture luxury that mean you can charge anything and do anything.
Luxury whisky is still a young product. Drinkers and fans of Macallan still remember when it was on an optic, and those consumers are still clinging to that old image. The timing of the updates has not helped. Of course, Macallan could not help when they turned 200, anymore than they could help the global changes that have seen secondary market demand plummet.
But perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps it will bring the space to embrace the new designs and the ethos that it encapsulates.
A Dream Collab
Finally I couldn’t help but ask who Ferras himself as a designer would love to work with
“I love sneaker design. My dream would be a collaboration with Nike—Air Jordan 1985 Chicagos are my all-time favourite.”
“If you know someone at Nike who wants to work with Macallan, let me know!”
Now that would be a collaboration I’d love to see!