HUNTER Luxury is celebrating after its Jack Daniel’s x McLaren Halo case was recognised with an AmeriStar Award for Design Excellence.
The presentation case, inspired by F1’s Halo safety device and unveiled at the Miami Grand Prix, is designed to unite premium brand storytelling with precision engineering, material innovation, and a carefully choreographed consumer experience.
Hunter Luxury worked with Brown-Forman and McLaren on the Jack Daniel’s x McLaren Halo MK1 Limited Edition case, which houses a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey, bottled at 58.7% ABV in tribute to McLaren founder Bruce McLaren’s first race car, an Austin 7 bearing the number 58. Judges recognised the distinctive wishbone structure inspired by the Halo safety device that sits above the cockpit of every F1 car.
A sculptural form aims to give the pack display presence, while a bespoke push-button mechanism is concealed beneath the McLaren logo on top of the unit. When pressed, it releases the bottle from its fitted cradle, turning the act of opening the pack into a piece of ‘mechanical theatre’. The movement, resistance, and sound were each refined during the design process, including the introduction of EVA elements to give the button a softer, more satisfying click.
Paul Hamilton, head of sales & marketing at Hunter Luxury, said, “To be recognised in the Design Excellence category at the AmeriStar Awards is a major endorsement of what Halo MK1 represents: the ability of packaging to carry a brand story through structure, movement, material, and detail. This was a genuinely collaborative achievement. Brown-Forman began with a bold structural idea rooted in McLaren’s visual language and inspired by one of Formula 1’s defining safety innovations. Working with the creative teams behind Jack Daniel’s and McLaren, our challenge was to convert that vision into a manufacturable object that embodies the presence of a trophy and the precision of automotive engineering, capturing the theatre, thrills and cutting-edge technology of motorsport.”
The finished structure contains more than 50 components, made from eight materials using eight manufacturing processes. Extruded aluminium elements were laser-cut and CNC-machined where required for finishing, alongside die-cast aluminium and injection-moulded polymer components.
Its carbon fibre styling recreates reference material supplied by McLaren, while an Alcantara-inspired lining provides a softer interior contrast, paying tribute to the flame-retardant fabric used to protect drivers in the cockpit. The signature McLaren Papaya surfaces use a satin mould finish to achieve a consistent matte appearance, while the black aluminium exterior is treated through an advanced electrophoresis process.
Sam Gardner, senior art director at Brown-Forman Global Design, added, “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.”
