1676: The Handwriting Behind the Bottle

Lock & Co. Hatters turned 350 this year. To mark it, they partnered with Floris London on a limited fragrance called "1676," the year Lock & Co. was founded. The number on the label didn't come from a type designer. It came from a handwriting contest inside their own team.

That's not a small choice for a brand like Lock & Co. Every hat that leaves their shop on St James's Street is still fitted using a conformateur, a measuring device from 1852 built to map the exact shape of one person's head, not a standard size. Their whole business has been built on the individual over the average for 350 years. So when it came time to put a number on a bottle marking that history, it makes sense they didn't reach for a clean, symmetrical typeface. They asked their own people to write it by hand and let one person's actual pen decide what would represent the brand.

My friend Violet entered. Her handwriting won. I wasn't commissioned for this project. She asked me to help turn it into something that could actually be printed, and I said yes.

Here's the part that's harder than it sounds. My instinct in any design software is to clean things up: even out the strokes, straighten what's crooked, snap it to a grid. That instinct is exactly wrong for this kind of work. Violet's handwriting didn't win because it was neat. It won because it was hers: the two sixes that didn't quite match, the seven leaning slightly forward, the small hitch in the loop where her pen caught the paper. Smoothing any of that out wouldn't have finished her work, it would have erased it. So I only touched what needed to survive production, a stroke too thin for gold foil stamping, a curve too tight for the label's size, and left everything else exactly as she wrote it.

There's a reason that kind of restraint matters more now than it used to. Most of what we make on a screen defaults toward perfect: even spacing, matched curves, symmetry the software gives you for free. That used to be a selling point. Now it's the opposite. It's what makes something forgettable. A slight hesitation in a line, an asymmetry that isn't quite balanced, those are the things that tell you a real hand was involved, and that's becoming rarer to see on purpose. If you work in digital tools, the skill worth building isn't just how to perfect something. It's knowing when to stop yourself from doing it.

Small project. But it's a good feeling watching a friend's actual handwriting end up on a bottle from one of the oldest names in London, printed the way she wrote it, not the way a program would have made it instead.