Buckley’s Awful Alarm Clock

The 2026 Marketing Awards awarded a merit for Sound Design for this! Also shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2026. Very cool.

The Ask

The email starts like it usually does; “Hi Hugh. We have this thing we want to make for our client. Can you take a look?” along with a description. Saatchi&Saatchi Canada wanted to put an alarm clock in a Buckley’s bottle for the world’s worst alarm clock. Buckley’s is well-known for the tagline “It tastes awful, and it works.”

Why not make the Awful Alarm Clock? It sounds awful. And it works. I ran out, bought a bottle of Buckley’s, dumped it out (or did I guzzle it, pass out and wake up two days later? I’ll never tell) cut a hole in the back did some display tests.

Number Display and Audio

I tested an OLED, LCD and a 7-segment display.

Turns out the 4-digit 7-segment display in red worked a treat! Realizing the plastic of the bottle becomes a lens and blue light doesn’t pass through it very well and white didn’t feel quite right either.

Fortunately, the team at Saatchi&Saatchi agreed that was the best option. With that checked off, I could then focus on the sound. I tried a small transducer that would have made the bottle itself into a speaker. That wasn’t loud enough. I tried a couple of different speakers. The winner ended up being a 3W 4ohm speaker. It was quite loud and was not hindered by being encased in the plastic bottle.

Then we discussed how it would all be controlled. The easiest solve is to have the ESP32 launch a Wi-Fi network, you connect to it and use a web interface served off the controller. However that’s not the most intuitive. I suggested using a rotary encoder under the cap. It’s an intuitive solution to make what appears to be a simple control method. I modelled a coupling to attach the bottle cap to the encoder and a second housing to connect the encoder base to the bottle. It looked amazing and worked so well.

For the record there is also a web interface but the cap control was a hit.

So now we have the basics covered I can concentrate on fitting everything into the bottle. First thing’s first; I need a custom PCB. The sound library will be stored on an SD card, the connections for the display, encoder, speaker, power switch, power routing all connected to an EPS32 S3.

Once this was confirmed, I knew I needed at minimum 12 as requested so I ordered 20 boards.

I find soldering sort of therapeutic and relaxing. Here’s a timelapse of me adding connectors for the power switch.

And another of me soldering the primary connectors on.

Designing the internal structure became my next priority. It took a few iterations to land on something that could properly hold everything and be structurally sound.

As you can see, there an upright stand on a base. This holds the display and speaker. There is a secondary cover on the back that the PCB connects to. Sandwiched between (not in the video) is the battery.

All of this is then attached to a base. Which is then attached to the bottle. The tricky part was how to give access to the power and charging. I had a visit from the Managing Director Tony Tarle who reacted to the first prototype with “this can be simpler” and pointed out some efficiencies. I closed the bottom, sliced the bottle at a pre-determined height and added a 3D printed coupling to the bottom. This had inset tabs and a screw hole with a heat set brass insert. Once inserted, you added one screw and that sealed the bottle. I printed a thin coupling to cover any cutting roughness and it ended up looking really good.

I was finally able to concentrate on writing firmware. In no particular order here is what the clock does;

• Set time in 12 or 24 hour display
• Set alarm sound
• Set alarm time
• Save settings
• Display time
• Activate alarm when appropriate
  • Flash display
  • Play audio file on loop off SD
• Snooze alarm
• Disable alarm for 24 hours

Plus the controls were available through the rotary encoder web server. When choosing an alarm, a preview would play. If you were choosing on the clock itself, it played through the speaker. If using the web interface, it played through the device.

Once all this worked as it should I could button everything up. I went into assembly line mode and made 14. 13 went to Saatchi, I kept one for myself.

I was so grateful for the opportunity to design and build this alarm clock. Thanks, Saatchi&Saatchi and Tony!