Johnnie Walker

Johnnie Walker is perennially the world’s largest-selling brand of whisky. It was born in 1820 when the young John Walker (1805–1857) used his inheritance to buy a small but prosperous “Italian grocery” (i.e., grocery, wine, and spirits shop) in Kilmarnock, 50 km southwest of Glasgow, and began selling whisky. Walker’s whisky was transformed into a true brand by his son Alexander (1837–1889), a man of steely determination and forceful language. By the mid-1860s, Alexander had trademarked the firm’s principal product, Old Highland Whisky, a blend that was sold in both round and square bottles with a distinctive slanting label. See whisky, scotch.

Setting up an office in London around 1871 was a key step in taking Walker’s whisky to the world: between 1865 and 1880 the business increased fourfold, but from 1880 it exploded. “It seems that my business doubles itself every year,” Alexander wrote in 1885, “and I feel sometimes as if I could almost wish it would double itself back because it is really more than one head can carry.”

The formation of a limited company in 1886 brought long-standing employees into the business along with Alexander’s sons. Quality was at its heart: they invested heavily in whisky stocks to ensure continuity of character of their blends, and also in primary production, purchasing Cardhu distillery in 1893. As the Whisky and Soda age took over from toddy drinking, heralding a lighter style of blend, the company introduced an age-differentiated range in 1906, with White, Red, and Black Label. See Highball.

“Quality will stand on its merit,” Alexander wrote, and advertising was eschewed. Into the vacuum this created in the 1880s and 1890s stepped the nickname “Johnny Walker,” celebrated in popular culture but disdained by the Walker family, who felt it was disrespectful to the founder. It took marketing director James Stevenson to persuade the business otherwise, resulting in the creation in 1908 of the famous striding “Johnnie Walker” figure, which rewrote the semiotics of whisky advertising at a stroke.

A burgeoning business with the United States was brought to an abrupt end by World War I and Prohibition, but Walker’s reputation in the United States was only enhanced during the fourteen “dry years,” during which it was a popular illegal import. In 1924 Walker’s merged with the Distiller’s Company, along with rivals Dewar’s and Buchanan’s, but retained a large degree of independence, in large part due to the influence of Alexander Walker II (1869–1950), as strong a character as his father. See Distillers Company Ltd (DCL). During and after World War II the export of scotch whisky to hard-currency markets was an imperative; the United States, with a particular taste for Black Label, was the most important. Growth was remarkable, with sales going from around one million nine-liter cases in 1955 to ten million in 1975. Oil-rich South American markets and the recovering European economies contributed to this, with Asia also becoming increasingly important. The withdrawal of over a million cases of Red Label from the UK market after a dispute with the EEC in 1978 coincided with the slump in demand that followed the oil crisis. Under new corporate ownership, first United Distillers and then Diageo, the brand clawed its way back to growth (partly due to inspired innovations such as the ultra-premium Blue Label, introduced in 1992), until the reinvention of the “Striding Man” character with the “Keep Walking” campaign saw it pass twenty million cases in 2018.

Morgan, Nicholas. A Long Stride: The Story of the World’s No. 1 Scotch Whisky. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2020.

Weir, R. B. The History of the Distiller’s Company, 1877–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

By: Nicholas Morgan

John Collin(s)’s signature, from 1790. Source: Wondrich Collection.