One employer. Thousands of different brands.
ChicoBag’s custom-products program puts other organizations’ branding onto our product line. The program existed before I joined it. Since 2020, I’ve handled the design side of the custom-products program, working from whatever comes in: finished artwork, something built for the wrong format, a low-resolution logo, or sometimes little more than a website.
CLIENT
ChicoBag
YEAR
2020-2026
DELIVERABLES
Brand Adaptation / Product Mockups / Production Artwork / Product Photography
ROLE
Sole Designer, Custom Products Program
The Job Changed With the Input
Requests usually fell into three kinds of work. Some customers knew exactly what they wanted and needed clean production prep. Others had artwork that needed to be reworked for the product. And sometimes there wasn’t much of a design yet at all, which meant researching the brand and developing concepts the sales team could bring back to the customer.
When there wasn’t enough to go on, I went looking. Jimbo’s was a good example. Sales had a few bag references and some artwork, but it felt generic compared with what I was seeing from the brand. I went through their website, social, and store imagery and kept coming back to a mural inside the grocery environment. I rebuilt parts of that visual language and used it to create bag concepts that felt much more like Jimbo’s.
Kodiak Cakes was another project where the brief was pretty open. Their team needed sustainable trade-show merchandise but didn’t have much time to art-direct it. I was essentially given their website and asked to come back with ideas. I pulled from the maroon, wood texture, logo treatment, and outdoorsy cabin feel already in the brand, then built concepts across four products. The work moved forward with almost no revisions.
Production constraints sometimes changed the design completely. For a 50th anniversary order from the Coachella Valley Association of Governments, the original artwork was planned as a full-color dye-sublimation print. When the budget pushed the project into a quick-turn, single-color option, I rebuilt the illustration from scratch so it would still read clearly with one ink color. It wasn’t about reproducing every detail. It was figuring out what had to survive for the design to still feel like the original.
Other projects
