The 'hobble skirt' bottle

(Published on 22 May 2007 in 'Women at Work' - W @ W - a supplement of the Daily Mirror, Colombo, Sri Lanka)

I attended the Finale of the Brand Equity Quiz in Mumbai recently and was greatly intrigued when a team was asked to comment on a picture shown on the monitor. The picture seemed old – say of the 1915’s and showed a couple in European attire. Just when the audience was wondering what the picture had to do in a Business Quiz – pat came the reply from one of the participants. The famous Coca-Cola bottle was designed to look like the ‘hobble skirt’ shown in the picture. That was a very interesting bit of trivia and I decided to find out just how a Coca-Cola ended up looking like a hobble skirt.

A hobble skirt is a skirt with a narrowing hem. It got its name as it inhibits the wearer's stride. The shape of the skirt made the wearer 'hobble’. The term 'hobble skirt' came into popular use in the early 1910s when a fashion trend started by French designer Paul Poiret introduced long skirts that were narrow at the hem. Interestingly some attribute the hobble skirt to Mrs. Hart Berg, the first American woman to fly with the Wright Brothers. To keep her skirts from flying out of control while airborne, she tied a rope around them below the knees.

The famous Coca-Cola bottle, called the contour bottle, which is also known to some as the "hobble skirt" bottle, was created in 1915. The Coca-Cola Company launched a competition among its bottle suppliers to create a new bottle for the drink. The brief was that it should be - "a bottle which a person could recognize even if they felt it in the dark, and so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was". Chapman Root, president of the Root Glass Company, delegated the task to members of his staff including Earl Dean, bottle designer and supervisor of the bottle moulding room. It was decided to base the bottle’s design on one of the drink’s two ingredients, the coca leaf or the cola nut. But as no information was available about coca or cola – Dean took inspiration from the gourd-shaped cocoa pod. It is also believed that he got the inspiration for the design from the ‘hobble skirt’.

Dean sketched out and created the mould for the bottle. The prototype bottle was approved and a design patent was issued on the bottle in November, 1915. The bottle was chosen over other entries by Coca Cola in 1916. By 1920, Dean’s contoured bottle became the standard for the Coca-Cola Company.

The Root Glass Company wanted to reward Dean for his efforts. He was offered a choice between a $500 bonus or a lifetime job at the Glass Company. He chose the lifetime job.

Miss Know-All
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