TwisTop: Transforming the RTD Market Through AI-Powered Brand Building

The Challenge

When Damon Jackson approached Adrian Van de Velde with TwisTop—a revolutionary Spirit Puck system that clips onto any 250ml cans to create instant premium cocktails—he had brilliant engineering and a patent-pending innovation. What he needed was a brand identity that could communicate the vision to two critical audiences: consumers who'd love the product, and spirit company executives who'd want to partner with it.

The brief was ambitious: create a complete brand ecosystem in six weeks—films showcasing the product across multiple social scenarios, a sophisticated website with 3D product visualization and investor dataroom capabilities, and positioning that would resonate equally with festival-goers and Grey Goose executives.

The Approach: Speed Meets Sophistication

Van de Velde recognized that TwisTop's innovation deserved storytelling that matched its ambition. Rather than conventional product photography, the team developed a cinematic campaign spanning four distinct social environments—nightclub, concert, baseball stadium, and beach—each demonstrating how TwisTop transforms the drinking experience.

The creative strategy leaned heavily into AI-powered content creation, not as a cost-cutting measure, but as a means to achieve production value that would typically require budgets ten times higher. "We created expansive summer music festival scenes, a baseball game and a beach party - all of which would have needed permits, crews, locations, and months of coordination using traditional filmmaking," Van de Velde explains. "AI allowed us to work at the speed of thought."

Building a Visual Language

The aesthetic framework drew from 90s observational cinema verité style meets high end commercial. Each scene was meticulously crafted to feel candid rather than posed, prioritizing authentic moments over polished product shots.

Fourteen distinct characters were developed with comprehensive backstories. Each character was paired with spirit-mixer combinations that authentically matched their demographics and social contexts—Grey Goose vodka with Red Bull for the nightclub energy, Jack Daniel's with Coca-Cola at the beach party.

The Technical Execution

Beyond the films, the project required a digital presence sophisticated enough to serve both consumer discovery and investor due diligence. The resulting website features a custom-built 3D product visualization using React Three Fiber, allowing users to rotate and examine the TwisTop's engineering in detail—something static photography would struggle to convey effectively.

The site architecture includes a JWT-authenticated investor portal providing access to technical specifications, market analysis, and partnership opportunities, while maintaining a consumer-facing aesthetic that emphasizes the product's lifestyle appeal. Built on Next.js 14 and deployed via Vercel, the platform balances technical sophistication with the approachable, playful tone essential to a spirits brand.

The Brand Positioning

Van de Velde's strategic insight was recognizing TwisTop as "the next drinks platform" rather than merely another RTD product. The messaging architecture addresses consumer pain points—no bar, no wait, no problem—while positioning the technology for potential licensing partnerships with premium spirit brands.

The tagline "Life's Better with a Twist" operates on multiple levels: the literal twist mechanism, the unexpected innovation, and the enhanced social experiences the product enables. Safety messaging around tamper-proof engineering was woven throughout, differentiating TwisTop in a market increasingly conscious of beverage security.

Results & Future Potential

The completed campaign package includes multiple film cutdowns optimized for various social platforms, comprehensive brand guidelines, character libraries for future content creation, and a website infrastructure designed to scale with the business. All assets were delivered with complete ownership and unlimited usage rights to the client.

Perhaps most significantly, the project demonstrates how AI-assisted creative workflows are democratizing access to premium content production. What would have required $300-400K in traditional film production budgets was achieved for a fraction of that investment, with delivery timelines that would be impossible using conventional methods.

As TwisTop moves from development to market launch, the brand foundation positions it to compete not just with other RTD products, but to establish an entirely new category in premium portable cocktails.