When coming up with design ideas, you never know where your next inspiration will come from.
Hong Kong pop culture is heavily influenced by Japanese and Korean pop culture. That’s why when we started to notice people in Hong Kong with Superdry shirts everywhere, we didn’t think too much of it. The quality of their fabrics is great, the dying is expert, and the designs riffing off of vintage Japanese cool coupled with their great choices in colors are all reasons why people love the brand.
If you are curious like me however, I’ve always wondered what the Japanese writing said – initially I just assumed that it was “Superdry” in Japanese. It was only after discussing with a friend that I learned that the Japanese writing in their signature design has no meaning! Not only that, Superdry isn’t even a Japanese brand! It’s from the UK!
I couldn’t believe it! A British brand that had created an identity leveraging Asian cool with vintage Japanese design and aesthetic.
And the Japanese didn’t even make sense!
As a side note, as a child growing up in the US, it always confused me every time I came back to Asia and saw the English sayings on clothes and in the stationary stores etc. It was often just a bunch of made up gibberish that made no sense.
Why?!?!
At the very least it should make sense!
That’s when the thought of doing a “super” design hit me. We often use the word “super” to emphasize what we are saying.
“That was super cute. ”
“He is super tall. ”
“Her hair is super long.”
It’s a message with a positive tone and something that we could really play around with. We could combine English and Chinese and also incorporate some cute character graphics. It would be perfect! If not perfect, at least it would make sense.
We began to brainstorm different design ideas and came up some really good ones. We had a lot of fun coming up with different sayings. We decided to go ahead with a neutral design and a more girly one and ended up settling on Superstar and Supercute because we loved the message.
Before deciding to go ahead with Superstar though, there were some great ones that we unfortunately discarded. High among them was this:
Hehehe. What do you think? Would you buy a bodysuit with this for your child?
