The Coca-Cola Company scores Designed in Singapore Award in Beverage category

The crossover between a lightsaber and Coca-Cola bottle was a phenomenal hit.

The Coca-Cola Company sealed a sponsorship deal with Disney for the final installment of the Star Wars franchise’s sequels in 2019, eventually giving birth to the iconic lighted Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Coca-Cola No Sugar bottles, a fresh and creative take that combined the Star Wars universe’s most famous artifact—the lightsaber—with the Coke bottle.

A cultural cross-over between the two ‘universes,’ the lighted Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Coca-Cola No Sugar bottle featured a revised version of the global packaging and the lightsabers to the franchise’s main characters on the labels.

“Working intensively with tech partners, we sought to light up the lightsabers on our Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Coca-Cola No Sugar 500ml PET bottle labels through cutting-edge and sustainable OLED technology,” said Lim Kean Yew, Integrated Marketing Communications Director, Coca-Cola Singapore. The result was a Coca-Cola bottle with a paper-thin, lighted label that looked similar to ordinary ones.

The labels also didn’t need smartphone or AR apps to work—they were built to “intuitively respond to a simple touch on the bottle.”

“Whilst lighted packaging is not new, these bottles are the world's first OLED plastic bottles—used for the first time in a mass consumer product packaging,” added Lim. For this, the company was awarded the Designed in Singapore Award in the Beverage category.

Only 8,000 bottles were launched exclusively in Singapore, and the company made the accessibility for these bottles more exciting by calling on consumers and Star Wars fans alike to join in a treasure hunt by solving riddles to discover the locations of the limited bottles all around the island.

Due to this, the lighted Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Coca-Cola No Sugar bottles became coveted collectibles, and PR value exceeded $1m as the bottles were featured in more than 250 articles by large media outlets. Coverage from these sites pushed demand for the bottles worldwide, and online marketplaces such as eBay and Carousell saw them being resold for as high as $1,000.

The stint was touted by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy as the “best-in-class example of a brand partnership use of [our] assets.” Meanwhile, The Coca-Cola Company’s CEO James Quincey named the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Coca-Cola No Sugar bottles as one of the company’s “top three innovations of 2019.”

“With this, we managed to (briefly) make Singapore the center of the Star Wars universe; transforming what began as a just limited local launch into a global replication in over 15 international Coca-Cola markets,” said Lim.