Jack Daniel’s x McLaren Halo MK1 takes the Alcoholic Drinks (£100-£1,000) category win, giving Hunter Luxury back-to-back victories following last year’s win for the Hendrick’s Whimsical Watering Can.
Hunter Luxury has secured back-to-back wins at the London Packaging Week Innovation Awards, with the Jack Daniel’s x McLaren Halo MK1 Limited Edition named the winner of the Alcoholic Drinks (£100–£1,000) category.
The victory follows Hunter Luxury’s success at the 2025 awards with the Hendrick’s Whimsical Watering Can, giving the luxury packaging specialist consecutive wins with two radically different projects united by ambitious design, technical engineering and an ability to turn packaging into an experience in its own right.
The original Halo MK1 design concept was created by the Jack Daniel’s Design team at Brown-Forman as part of the brand’s partnership with the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team, taking inspiration from Formula 1’s Halo safety device. Hunter Luxury was tasked with bringing that ambitious creative vision to life, leading the development, engineering, prototyping and manufacture required to turn it into a collector-grade presentation case for Jack Daniel’s.
The victory adds to a growing international awards haul for Halo MK1, which has attracted recognition across design, packaging and innovation since its launch.
Paul Hamilton, Head of Sales & Marketing at Hunter Luxury, said: “Winning this award for a second consecutive year is incredibly special, particularly because Halo MK1 represents exactly the kind of challenge we want to take on at Hunter Luxury.
“The original design concept from the Jack Daniel’s Design team was extraordinarily ambitious. Our challenge was to turn that vision into something real, repeatable and manufacturable without losing any of the theatre that made the concept so exciting in the first place.
“More than 50 individual components have to work together precisely every time someone interacts with Halo MK1, but the consumer should never be conscious of that complexity. They press a button, the bottle is released and the whole experience feels completely effortless. Achieving that simplicity took an enormous amount of engineering, prototyping, problem-solving and collaboration behind the scenes.
“To follow last year’s win for the Hendrick’s Whimsical Watering Can with Halo MK1 is something the entire team can be proud of. They are very different projects, but both demonstrate what becomes possible when a brilliant creative idea is supported by the engineering and manufacturing expertise needed to make it happen.”
The win also marks another milestone for Halo MK1 and the wider Jack Daniel’s and McLaren collaboration. The original design developed by the Jack Daniel’s Design team sought to combine the identities of two globally recognised brands rather than simply place them alongside one another.
Reflecting on the creative ambition behind the project, Sam Gardner, Senior Art Director at Brown-Forman Global Design, said: “There was a point when it stopped feeling like a case or a gift pack and started to feel like a piece of sculpture. That was when I realised people weren’t going to hide this away in a cupboard. They were going to treat it like a centrepiece.
“So many brand collaborations can end up feeling like two logos have simply been placed on an existing format. We wanted to genuinely share the DNA of Jack Daniel’s and McLaren to create something neither brand could have made on its own.
“My hope is that, 20 years from now, a collector can look at Halo MK1 on a shelf and still see it as a moment when we got that balance right. If it still feels striking and relevant, then we’ve done our job.”
Hunter Luxury’s consecutive victories demonstrate two very different approaches to creating lasting value through limited-edition packaging. While the Hendrick’s Whimsical Watering Can transformed a drinks pack into an object designed to live beyond the bottle, Halo MK1 demonstrates how ambitious creative design can be realised through precision engineering, complex manufacturing and mechanical interaction, turning the reveal itself into part of the experience.
The London Packaging Week Innovation Awards celebrate outstanding packaging across luxury, beauty, drinks, food, consumer goods and sustainability, recognising projects that combine creative thinking with technical execution and real-world impact.
Hamilton added: “Winning once is a fantastic endorsement of a project. To come back 12 months later with something completely different and win again says something bigger about the expertise within our business and the standard of work our clients trust us to deliver.
“We’re fortunate to work with brands and creative teams prepared to push what packaging can do. Our job is to take those ambitions, however challenging they might initially appear, and find a way to make them possible.”
Our team of packaging experts works with the world’s largest brands. Drop us a line at info@hunterluxury.com, we’d love to talk through your project brief with you.
