: views from the Hill

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

SoBe or not SoBe

A while back (five years back now), I fell in love with the South Beach Beverage Company (Sobe)'s bottle design.

The designs are based on a lizard motif, but the colors used on the bottles vary. The bottle caps vary (and have wise ass sayings that also vary). The lizard design varies. The beverage color inside varies. Even the molded lizards on the clear glass of the bottles vary. The design is cool, and Sobe's decision to keep the design intact while it goofs around to make a distinct bottle for each beverage flavor created a cult following.



Folks I worked with knew how much I liked the designs and began bringing me bottles. I kept one of each design I came across in a corner of my office at the startup company. By the time I left the startup in mid-2001, Sobe had become a subsidiary of Pepsi Cola North America and I had a dozen or so different bottle types to pack up and take home with me. The younger niblet has augmented that collection since, but loved as it was, my collection was a mere fraction of the Sobe designs available.

I kept the bottles along a window sill in this office ... until today when I realized that I wouldn't be taking them to San Francisco and they'd have to be ditched at some point. Why not today? But first, I would take a picture of each.

In the process I discovered that two of the bottles were duplicates.

No comments: