Shapely bottle

Coca-Cola’s shapely Contour Bottle is instantly recognisable and iconic and it is the first bottle design ever to be registered, the second being the dimpled bottle for Dimple Scotch whisky which followed in 1919.

Introduced in 1906, the original Coca-Cola bottles were straight-sided and sealed with Hutchinson Stoppers. The problematic stoppers were replaced with crown caps when these became available but the straight-sided Coke bottles are still known as Hutchinson Bottles. It is this bottle that was re-introduced by Coca-Cola in 2019 for its Signature Mixers range.

Hutchinson bottle

But it is the shapely “contour” bottle that helped make Coca-Cola a global household name. Designed by Alexander Samuelson of the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana and patented on 16th November 1915, the prototype was known as the Hobbleskirt bottle, after the fashionable skirt of the day. The original was shapelier, inspiring its Mae West bottle nickname, but was slimmed down to fit bottling machines when it went into production in 1916. This contour bottle was the only packaging used by The Coca‑Cola Company for 40 years until the king-size package was introduced in 1955.