Matreshka
One of the quickest projects I’ve ever done. Chinese officials visited a small Siberian town, were impressed by the local ice cream and asked to bring it to China. They needed a brand for it.
“Do something like that famous coffee brand…”
Yeah, that green brand, haha. They popularised the circular logo, and a million brands already exist on that template. So how do you make it instantly recognisable? The matryoshka, and the Russian colours.
I’m not really familiar with Slavic patterns, so instead of opening Google, I spent an unhealthy amount of time bothering souvenir shop owners to let me photograph real matryoshkas, the kind you’d find in the streets of Siberia. I’m still glad I did, and I’d do it again.
The badge, and the first place it went up.
Ice cream, cookie, drink, the whole deal.
Instead of blatantly stealing a pattern like a lot of my competitors do, I bought the commercial rights to one from a famous (and expensive) stock site, because I didn’t have time to make one from scratch. Then I applied the brand elements to the entire packaging line.
Coffee cups, ice cream tubs and cone sleeves.
Merch and uniforms should always be PEAK.
That apron alone got me a lot of orders for custom apron designs. Honestly, it’s not always easy to find a partner who can sew and print textile the way I need it to look, but since this was going to China, there were plenty of big workshops that could easily handle it.
Yeah, that Chinese woman looks strange: the apron is my design, but I asked an old version of OpenAI’s Sora to put it on a woman. I decided not to update it with NanoBanana 2.1, to keep it as a souvenir.
The apron, on shift and on its own.
T-shirt and tote bag.
So, yeah.
It all happened really fast. City Day festival, a phone call from a partner who happened to be there to witness the scene and mentioned me, a few messages back and forth, maybe a week to make the whole thing and check that nobody had ever drawn a similar logo, and that’s it.
It feels like a very stereotypical project, and what they produced probably drifted a lot from my original design, but with the volume and size of the projects I was starting, I honestly didn’t have time to ask how the Chinese side handled it.