“No Weapon Formed, Winter Arc”, Saint Kaizen’s Top Selling Design, 2024
Saint Kaizen’s 2024 Campaign Launches
Saint Kaizen’s has a soft spot in my heart as a brand I worked with. It became the first brand that shifts the spark within me, the excitement in creating for brands and seeing the old mindset “I can’t.” go. I bet some brands also relate to that, the frustration of being held back to grow because of such circumstances.
A Little Backstory with Saint Kaizen
December 2023, their Instagram got wrongfully taken down. They built 50,000 followers for 2 years. In an instant it’s gone. They have to make decisions right away – appeal, stop or start over.
They chose to start over. It was a decision that’s hard and requires a lot of commitment, figuring out and sleepless nights. I came across them around that restart.
The Challenge with Creative Freedom
I’ve worked with brands who nitpick about 0.1 font weight on their brand guidelines. The challenge with Saint Kaizen? They gave me a theme verse, a theme look and I could do so much with it. It may be liberating to some, but for me I stumbled about it for quite sometime. I began proposing a lot of designs and didn’t know if I am doing it right, some simpler, some explorative. Depends on what takes the spark. It’s like throwing multiple stones at the water and seeing where the ripple goes. A bit of doing and testing. But once the creative direction limitations become clearer, it propelled to a lot of works that are going the right way. From then on I learned the importance of Art Direction. It saves time, and assure both sides of alignment. It’s a clear visual guide to make sure we aren’t stepping on thorny path. I have worked as a designer with their Art Director and it has become an important part of my internal process to this day. I have made it a point to always include a direction proposal before going on production of any creative work I do.
The Limitations
There were some designs that they tried before that didn’t work for them, they were not selling. I notice it’s the minimalist designs that didn’t work for them, so I tried experimenting on the different direction, going maximalist. More intricate, elaborative designs. Counterpart competitors are steering more on minimalism too. Maybe that’s not the way to go? I was inspired that time by intricate illustrations that feel more hand drawn. Digital and traditional. There’s some fatigue with the trials that didn’t work and there’s an internal itch to find the right look for “No Weapon Formed”. I am getting the same references out of my research but classical hand drawn archives felt like the right one. It felt like a homage to a grounded faith that’s true, lasting and tested.
It’s unusual but the brand slowly became more distinct to its core visually- bold, unafraid, and loud about its faith.
First Product Samples – Signs That It’s Going to Work
Intricate design demands different method of production. When the first test product came out, the quality, fabric material, you could tell it’s going to land, how it’s good worn by a person. Months pass, they doubled down on promotion, posting, strategy, production, then came launching. I was scared to be honest, after all we’re taking on an experiment. Surprisingly it sold out in a week. This is the first time they had that much fast demand after some time. They had multiple restock and sold out weeks. Other designs were selling out too “Soldier of God”, “Cross”, “Christ is King”. And notable launches like “Fear Not” “Archangel Michael” and “Sword Pump”. They recovered so fast with preparing well for these launches. The demand kept growing faster than predicted and the products grew too for hoodies, caps, duffle bags. They doubled growth in shorter time and kept on growing exponentially ever since.
To me it’s weird. the numbers felt really great. But what I was looking forward was the organic comments from strangers, brand fans, the attention and conversation it started. Strangers from around the globe from different cities and culture are excited about it. Proud of representing what they believe and who they are through the shirts.
“Last December when our instagram with 50k followers got wrongfully taken down. We didn’t know what the next steps were. Do we appeal? Do we stop the brand? Do we start again? […] Through these key fundamentals we were able to not only get back to where we were but double it.”