THE ROOSTER FACTORY RETURNS TO ICELAND TO EXPAND THE MOSI GIN MYTHOS

Los Angeles-based creative studio The Rooster Factory has revisited Iceland to deepen its creative partnership with Arnar Agnarsson’s Mosi Gin. Known for its award-winning drinks industry work, the consultancy is shaping the brand through cinematic storytelling and place-based identity, using Iceland’s surreal landscapes to build narrative, authenticity, and global premium appeal.

Los Angeles-based creative studio and strategic brand consultancy The Rooster Factory has once again packed its bags for the surreal landscapes of Iceland — a return journey driven by a partnership that blends design, storytelling, and the sensory nuance of spirits culture. Known for its award-winning work in the drinks industry across Europe and America, the consultancy has been carving an unusually cinematic narrative around Icelandic gin brand Mosi, founded by entrepreneur and distiller Arnar Agnarsson. The relationship has become a case study in how modern craft alcohol brands increasingly require worlds to inhabit, not just liquids to bottle.

Iceland presents an irresistible canvas for such mythology-building. The country’s volcanic textures, geothermal plumes and eerie expanses of tundra lend both mystique and credibility to a gin that draws on local botanicals and a distinctly Nordic clarity. For The Rooster Factory, the terrain functions almost like a production studio, only with nature as the art director and time as the lighting technician. “We’re excited to continue collaborating with Arnar Agnarsson, founder and CEO of Mosi Gin, and returning to Iceland to bring Mosi Gin to life and explore the extraordinary,” says Audrey Fort, Co-Founder of The Rooster Factory. In her words, “the extraordinary” spans physical geography as much as cultural temperament — Iceland’s quiet confidence, its self-contained resourcefulness and its matter-of-fact relationship with the sublime.

Mosi Gin itself sits at an intersection that premium craft beverages are increasingly navigating. It is artisanal but contemporary, tied to place but oriented toward a global bar audience, rooted in slow distillation yet reliant on fast-moving cultural signals — design, photography, and the social media grammar that propels desire. That duality has opened the door for studios like The Rooster Factory, which has made a speciality of fusing brand strategy with atmospheric storytelling. Their approach to Mosi has gone beyond bottle or label design, instead treating the brand as an ecosystem that requires meaning, texture and narrative consistency.

Part of that ecosystem involves reframing Iceland not merely as a source of raw ingredients, but as an emotional origin story. The Rooster Factory’s work draws heavily on a kind of Nordic magical realism — not fantasy, but awe. Their photographic and visual direction often showcases stark contrasts: jet-black rocks against white mists, the clarity of glacial water, moss so green it looks digitally enhanced. For drinkers who may never visit Iceland, the imagery acts as a sensory invitation, whispering that to sip Mosi is to touch a place otherwise unreachable. In a drinks market saturated with contrived backstories, the authenticity of such imagery carries weight.

From Agnarsson’s perspective, the return of the studio to Iceland signals both continuity and ambition. The founder has been positioning Mosi for thoughtful international expansion, aiming at markets that respect craft, heritage and premium spirits culture. Rather than rely on conventional advertising, the brand is leaning into experiential storytelling — fieldwork that becomes campaign material, collaborative shoots that blend documentary aesthetics with brand-building, and a cross-border creative partnership that mirrors the transnational nature of contemporary drinks culture itself. The United States and Europe remain key battlegrounds for gin, where consumers oscillate between classic London Dry profiles and more exotic botanical expressions. Mosi’s Icelandic imprint offers differentiation that is subtle rather than theatrical.

This form of brand-building also reflects wider shifts in how luxury craft alcohol markets operate. Provenance, sustainability and narrative cohesion matter as much as taste profiles and awards. The Rooster Factory’s involvement brings strategic muscle to that reality: in the drinks industry, the studio has established itself as a consigliere for labels looking to cross from niche acclaim to cultural relevance. Their return to Iceland suggests that the next chapter of Mosi’s story will involve bigger stages, more immersive content and a more assertive articulation of identity.

For now, the collaboration is an emblem of a phenomenon unfolding quietly within premium spirits: brands are no longer merely consumed, they are inhabited. A gin can no longer simply taste of juniper; it must feel like a postcard from somewhere extraordinary. For Mosi Gin, that postcard continues to be written on Icelandic moss, under geothermal smoke and through the lens of a Los Angeles studio chasing wonder at the edges of the map.