Here's one of those design concepts sure to make the blog rounds, even though it's more neat-looking than practical. The "Bottlass"—meant to be a portmanteau of "bottle" and "glass," but perhaps they ought have gone with the less titillating "Glottle"—in essence turns beverage packaging design on its head. The idea is that a glass container shaped like an inverted wine glass, minus the base, is sealed and shipped with an aluminum base nested into the bottom. After purchase, the consumer is meant to remove the base, flip the container, open the top via a pull-tab, and insert the glass stem into the base, via "screw tab joining," as per the description—can anyone tell me what that means?—or "forced insertion."
While other websites have claimed these designs are "manufactured in Korea," this is clearly a concept that isn't in production. And here's why I don't think it's practical.
User Experience: Opening the Thing
Imagine holding any of these shapes in your hand, and trying to pull the seal off of that wide mouth without spilling any of the contents. Think you could do it? How much concentration and time would it require versus opening a bottle top or popping a tab on a can?
User Experience: Drinking From It
Looking at the renderings above, I'm not convinced that the hole in the base—whether threaded or press-fit—is deep enough to provide the stability necessary to securely support the stem.No Functional Benefit to Two-Piece Design
Perhaps most damning is that there's simply no functional benefit conferred by this design beyond the novelty. For example, you've probably seen those cheapie screw-stem plastic wineglasses that look like this:
Because the connection point is midway between the bowl and stem, this breaks down to nearly half of its height, and you can stick the inverted stem inside the bowl during shipping. That provides a benefit. In contrast, the Bottlass is nearly the exact same height assembled as it is disassembled.
Since the Bottlass' point-top, glass design is too fragile to be pallet-stacked like say, plastic bottles...
...it would of course have to be shipped like wine bottles, with a cardboard grid insert like this:
Which begs the question: If there's virtually no height difference between the assembled and disassembled versions, and it will require a cardboard support grid, why not just ship the thing assembled in the first place? For that matter, why not just ship it as one contiguous piece of glass?
Lastly, these containers have to be filled on a production line. On filling lines, containers either have flat bottoms that ride on a belt...
...or they have collared necks that can be "grabbed" by tabs that support the bottle in space as it's filled:
The flat-bottom option is out here. And as you can see with the tabs in the photo of the green bottles above, the tabs are typically flat, simply-shaped pieces of metal, because when you need 100,000 tabs you want to keep the cost of each down. While it would be possible to create some kind of compound-curved tabs or nesting stands that could hold each Bottlass securely in place on the line during filling, I can't see a company swallowing the extra cost when there's no appreciable benefit.