The label has a quote line. It sits below the brand name in italic Cormorant Garamond, in a soft ink tone that reads as a printer's note rather than a customer addition. The line attracts more customer thinking than any other field on the label, and most of the thinking is wrong.
What works
Short. Specific. Old. Pithy in the way a maxim is pithy. A family motto in Latin that no living member of the family knows, but which has been on the family signet for three generations. A line from a letter the grandfather wrote during the war. A piece of advice the matriarch gave that has been remembered, exactly, by every grandchild. These age. They become more interesting, not less, the further the customer gets from the moment they chose them.
What dies
Pop-culture references. Song lyrics that scan as deep in the moment and as embarrassing by the time the bottle is being inherited. Inside jokes from the engagement party. Hashtag-form imperatives ('live, laugh, love'). The cheerful aphorism the customer bought as a sign for their kitchen in 2014. These do not age. They calcify. The kindest thing is to say no. The studio's job, when the customer types these in, is to say no, gently, by suggesting one of the alternatives below.
Defaults that work
If the customer cannot land on a line: the family's founding year, in script, with the word 'since.' The country of origin. The street name of the house the family has lived in longest. A single word in the family's language of origin: forza, gloria, virtù, courage, alma. Each of these reads as natural foil text. None embarrasses a generation later.
When we run a customer through the quote-line decision, we tell them to imagine their grandchild reading the label aloud at a dinner. If the line embarrasses the grandchild, it is the wrong line. If the line means nothing to the grandchild, that is fine; the meaning will come, but it must not make the grandchild flinch. The flinch test is the only test.