Before there was steel, there was a drawing: 95 × 95 × 185 mm of black card, gold linework, two bartenders facing each other across the panels.

The box had to be designed before the shaker was finished, because the box is where the story gets told first. Enrico on one side, Marcos on the other, and between them the line we kept coming back to every time a decision got hard — created from heart & passion.

This is the part nobody photographs. Before a single shaker exists, someone has to make the thing that makes the shaker.

A hand-cut die, a fifty-year-old green press, and a small blue template held up to the camera to prove the angle was right. We went back and forth on that angle for days. A degree either way and the whole trick stops working.

One stroke of the press. That's the whole trick — the piece that lives inside the shaker and makes the impossible look easy.

It comes off the die still wearing its blue protective film, which is why every early photo of it looks like it's glowing. We asked for one to be held up to the camera so we could see the fold. Then we asked again. Then again.

Raw tins, spun and trimmed, stacked in blue crates on a green concrete floor. This is the least glamorous the Magic Shaker will ever look — and our favourite photo of the whole run.

Every batch was counted by hand and tagged with a scrap of cardboard and a marker. No barcodes, no scanners. Somebody's handwriting is the only thing standing between the count being right and the count being wrong.

The mechanism goes in. The laser goes on. From this second forward, the secret and the shaker are one object and there is no taking it back out.

A laser weld leaves a seam you can feel with a fingernail but can't see across a bar. That was the requirement, and it's the reason this step is done one shaker at a time instead of a hundred at once.

Polished until the factory ceiling shows up in the side of it. This is the moment a piece of pressed steel starts looking like something you'd want in your hand on stage.

Look down the throat of a finished one and you can just see it — the fold, the fin, the little welded point. That's the whole thing. Now go and make a room full of people miss it.

Pourers, bagged one at a time. Not the glamorous part of the shipment — but the part that decides whether the first pour out of the box feels right or feels cheap.

We could have skipped these. Plenty of people would have. But the first thing you do with a new shaker is pour something into it, and we weren't going to let that moment be the weak link.

Eight weeks after it existed only as a flat file, the box arrived as a box — black, gold-lined, stacked in a carton next to the flat-packed inserts waiting to be folded.

If you still have yours, look at the inside flap. That's where the card with your code lives. That card is the reason you're reading this page.

Thirty-two pieces per carton. Thirty-two cartons. 9.3 kg net, 12.2 kg gross, 41 × 41 × 38.5 cm each. That's the entire first run of the Magic Shaker 2.0, sitting on one pallet in a warehouse in China.

Someone wrote the carton numbers on by hand — 3 of 32, 18 of 32, 27 of 32 — then wrapped the whole thing in plastic and sent us a photo. That photo is the closest thing this project has to a finish line.

Yours was in one of those boxes.