Paper Son Collaboration

Limited edition merchandise I designed for Paper Son Coffee, a beloved new coffeeshop in San Francisco.

As a long-time San Francisco resident, I love working with local businesses to create fun merchandise that reflects with their spirit and resonates with their customers.

I recently had the chance to create a custom milk glass mug in collaboration with Paper Son Coffee, a coffeeshop in San Francisco with a main location downtown, and new branches in areas like Dogpatch and Chinatown. Paper Son has a fun, community-forward ethos, and the owner, Alex, and I had a great time brainstorming ideas that would bring joy to their merchandising shelf.

I created the illustration, and also directed the manufacturing and packaging process (using my experience from running my own shop and working with small manufacturers).

We are currently working on our next merchandise collaboration, a shirt that will be specific to Paper Son's new Chinatown location.

Detail shots of the final mug.

Some of the initial concepts we explored. We knew from the start that we wanted to do something critter-centric!

I wanted to hand illustrate the scene to retain a bit of the handdrawn texture, but the manufacturer's specifications needed a vector file. I ended up vectorizing the whole illustration but using a bit of a dithering texture on the lines to give the scene more life.