Blended for adventure

51 Eggs partnered with Westland Distillery to develop a new blended whiskey brand, Watchpost Whiskey. The brief was to leverage Westland’s premium brand DNA and create a new sub-brand for a blended whiskey targeting a mass-market audience. While Westland is proudly rooted in its American Single Malt position, its messaging targets serious connoisseurs who obsess about the details of the whiskey. As a counterpoint, our strategy was for Watchpost to take an understated approach to its quality positioning through a prominent age statement, while focusing the brand’s messaging and visual expression entirely on the experience of sharing the whiskey and adventures with friends.

Where Westland focuses on the provenance and terroir of the Pacific Northwest, Watchpost embraces its PNW roots through the lens of outdoor experiences. The brand’s design is inspired by the visual language of the National Parks and the National Forest Service, as well as the aesthetic heritage of outdoor brands. Core elements of the Westland visual identity, such as the iconic Treecoil logo and diamond-shaped label, were reinterpreted for Watchpost to reinforce the two brands’ connection, while carving out new aesthetic territory for Watchpost to inhabit.

Beyond the packaging, in preparation for the launch, the brand was extended across multiple assets to expand on the outdoor experience story. Every object we created had real-world, practical uses in the field. From branded storm matches, beanies, and caps to a waterproof product brochure that served as a field guide to survival tactics and doubled as a windscreen for starting an emergency campfire in adverse conditions.

The brand launched in the summer of 2025 in Washington state to an enthusiastic response with multiple in-store displays and broad early adoption by bartenders in signature cocktails. Watchpost is slated for a national US launch in the spring of 2026.