FCKLCK makes reuse literal in TIEN’s 3.2 million logo variations

One evening in Antwerp, over beers and bourbon shots, FCKLCK’s James Kruger opened Illustrator with a simple premise: if a vintage clothing store sells pre-owned pieces from Nike, Adidas, Diesel and dozens of other brands, why not build its identity the same way? By midnight, he and his friend Stijn Klaver had created twenty different wordmarks for TIEN, each one assembled entirely from fragments of existing brand logos. The next morning, the question was obvious – did it still work in daylight? The answer launched a complete rebrand. TIEN operates from Groningen with a straightforward model: every piece of clothing costs €10. The store focuses on casual fashion and sportswear from the 1960s through the early 2000s, removing the usual mental calculation between desire and price. Customers choose what they love without weighing cost, which shifts shopping from transaction to genuine selection. For owner Aline Bus, the fixed price makes vintage more democratic whilst supporting circular fashion through accessibility rather than moral lectures. The existing identity featured the name in a cheerful vintage typeface set in yellow and pink. Functional, but it lacked the impact to properly position what TIEN actually represents. Klaver, Aline’s boyfriend and an Art Director at TBWA Belgium, mentioned the project to Kruger one evening. “She had just opened a second vintage clothing store,” Kruger recalls. “The space next door to her existing vintage designer label shop had become vacant, and while sourcing pieces for the high-end store, she often ended up with more casual, sporty vintage items that did not fit that selection.” Vintage stores contain different styles, eras and brands colliding in one space – so the identity could work the same way. They opened Illustrator, pulled PNGs of casual and sports fashion brand logos containing ‘T,’ ‘I,’ ‘E’ or ‘N,’ and started cutting and clipping. “We began collaging them together in a loose, chaotic way,” Kruger explains. “Before we knew it, we had around 20 different TIEN wordmarks built entirely from fragments.”