Waterloo is one of the most recognized flavor-forward sparkling water brands in the US, sold through nearly every major retailer. As the brand prepared for a packaging relaunch, we partnered with Waterloo to redesign drinkwaterloo.com on Shopify, giving the brand a more premium site that connects shoppers to the retailers and marketplaces where they buy.
Waterloo's new packaging puts its flavors front and center, bold, saturated, and unmistakably its own. Bringing that same energy to the website meant every product image had to carry the same weight, across an entire flavor lineup.
Waterloo’s new photoshoot captured the people and lifestyle moments. To complement those assets, we built an artificial intelligence (AI) content workflow to generate the product and ingredient imagery, bringing every flavor in the lineup to life on the site efficiently and at scale.
Early in the project, we mapped out three unique concepts exploring typography, color palettes, and photography art direction. During this stage, the Waterloo team chose the style that felt most like them: flavor-forward, saturated, and premium. The goal was imagery that could uniquely be Waterloo’s and entirely ownable from a brand perspective.
Before generating a single image, we had to define what "on-brand" content looked like: product, color, and ingredients working together with the bold, flavor-forward energy of the new identity. Once that style was set, we iterated it across each flavor's individual color palette and ingredient cues, from bright citrus to deep berry tones.
Product imagery came together in Figma Weave, giving us a repeatable structure to apply across the full flavor lineup. From Lemon Italian Ice to Apple Pie à la Mode and Raspberry Nectarine, the expansive lineup spans a wide range of unique flavor profiles, each carefully developed through their signature Flavor Artistry.
For the floating fruit imagery that appears throughout the site, we generated fruit compositions using carefully selected fruit cues in Midjourney, then built a preset filter in Figma's native AI tools, tuning grain and color saturation, to give every image the same distinct look.
AI can move fast, but it can't reason the way a person can. Left alone, it would make changes humans wouldn’t, like subtly altering packaging label details or introducing small inconsistencies it had no way of knowing mattered. It doesn’t have a completely logical sense of what's correct, only what looks plausible.
That's why a Barrel Designer stayed involved at every stage of the process. Nearly every AI-generated image needed small refinements in Photoshop based on specific feedback, and packaging labels in particular required careful, close editing to preserve the original details exactly as designed. AI gave us efficiency, but it took a human eye throughout to make sure speed never came at the cost of accuracy.
AI tools can meaningfully speed up how a brand produces on brand content at scale, but they work best paired with a clear style framework and a human eye for the details AI won't catch.
Curious how this fits into the larger project? Read the full Waterloo case study to see how the site's identity, storytelling, and shopping experience came together.
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