With COVID’s continued presence in our lives, social distancing continued into a time that is usually filled with parties, family gatherings and holiday festivities. People were looking for ways to make new traditions, and to connect with their loved ones from afar. Tequila is often associated with specific holidays and occasions like Cinco de Mayo and Fourth of July. In an effort to shift the narrative around tequila, Patrón wanted a holiday experience that made tequila THE go to spirit to gift for the holiday season. Patrón also wanted a way to help customers connect despite holiday plans shifting across the country, while also maintaining their brand narrative. This led us to create a two-sided experience for both gifters and recipients that took the act of gifting alcohol from an easy one to a thoughtful one.

Gifters of Patrón can use a module embedded into Patrón's existing website to create a custom wrapping including photos, text, and stickers that transforms into a 360-degree augmented reality (AR) gift wrapping around their Patrón bottle. This gives customers a chance to use this emerging technology in a new way that hasn’t been available in retail before. This was the spirits industry's first user-generated augmented reality experience, allowing users to be an active participant in using emerging technology and curating their own content within that space.

Using augmented reality for this experience had several advantages. The most obvious one being that this experience provides a sentimental gift without having to enter a store or be in the same physical space as the recipient — helping maintain social distancing amid the pandemic. Additionally, augmented reality provides a way for users to generate their own content while maintaining the Patrón brand.

Harnessing the power of AR brought the holiday cheer customers could be missing into the palm of their hand and inside their home — connecting people who want to be together this holiday digitally. Additionally, Patrón has a history of creating limited-run packaging and bottles and this experience offers customers peak exclusivity with the ability to customize every individual bottle they purchase, so the virtual expansion of exclusive boxes was a natural progression for the brand.

To begin the virtual gift wrapping process, users can enter patrontequila.com/giftwrap via their desktop or mobile device. From there, gifters of Patrón can create a custom virtual wrapping using photos, text, backgrounds, and stickers that will transform into a 360-degree augmented reality gift wrapping around their Patrón bottle. Once finalized, the user will receive a link that they can share with a recipient 21 years or older via text, email or social media. The gifter will also be directed to patrontequila.com where they will be able to purchase a bottle of Patrón to send to their recipient to wrap up their experience. Once the recipient receives their link, they will be able to see their custom gift wrapping come to life using WebAR by holding their phone camera over their box of Patrón.

The Patrón activation was imperative to getting customers to the point of purchase during the holiday season. When using the experience, 53% of gifters clicked through to purchase Patrón before exiting the experience. Users spent an average of 1 minute and 45 seconds in the experience, and each custom AR experience was viewed on average 2.6 times. Additionally, 47% of recipients downloaded the captured content, which lead to more interaction on social media for Patrón. The AR experience also caught the eye of celebrity tattoo artist JonBoy, leading to a collaboration with additional content for the experience as an exclusive for National Tequila Day. This experience is also evergreen for the brand, which means that it can be, and has been updated past the holiday season, to activate gifting tequila around other holidays such as National Tequila Day and in the future Cinco De Mayo.