Heineken wants to celebrate 15 years of UEFA Champions League (UCL) sponsorship with the first Unlimited Edition ever made: an impressive special edition packaging range made up of 60 million individual bottles.

The challenges were:

- to create something extraordinary for Heineken, universally considered a "LOVE BRAND" with a great heritage in terms of well-known design editions and partnership.

- to connect the Special Edition to the TV Campaign "Unmissable moments"

- to remain "brand consistent"

- to be appealing for all, still remaining relevant for the UCL fans

- to not run in excess of the costs of production and printing compared with the ordinary product chain.

The project involved the 33 cl. and 66 cl. bottles for the Italian market.

The creative idea was to make 60 million different labels "designed by music".

To do that, we combined the UCL anthem, the soundtrack of the unmissable moment for both the brands, together with 1000 crafted patterns.

It works through an original, made to measure, algorithm, in order to create the widest limited edition, made up of the highest number of individual pieces ever made before.

First step: research. One and a half months looking for engineering partners to face such a huge challenge, finally going for a video game creator company.

Second phase: creating a master label leveraging on the star icon, the design element that Heineken and UEFA Champions League logos have in common. 1000 crafted patterns have been designed one by one to assure the widest possible diversity. The chosen style has been the optical one because of its dichromism, purely geometric, and impactful design.

Third phase: creating 20 different 3D morphing effects to animate the optical patterns starting from a videogame software.

Final phase: defining an original algorithm that converts the music score of the UCL anthem into digital inputs, able to twist every single pattern into a wonderful and stunning design.

The Heineken Unlimited Edition is the largest special edition ever made in the history of packaging. It values and strengthens two key themes for Heineken: music and design. It is disruptive for UCL fans and memorable for other consumers; iconic in design; consistent to the brand identity. And all of this, without increasing the costs of the production line.

A project that merges together the most innovative technologies such as A.I. and the value of the most traditional craftsmanship.

The Heineken Unlimited Edition has breaking record numbers.

1 original algorithm

20 3D morphing effects

1000 tailor-made patterns

9120 code lines

16 TB files

40 hours for copying them on an old "hard disk"

350 hours for generating all labels

500.000 checked labels one by one in a day

3922 pdf files generated