Finger licking good: Regrets Only’s colour-blocked brand spices up Potluck’s Korean pantry staples

If you’re based in the US and have been looking for Korean pantry staples to amp up your meals, look no further than Potluck. Founded by Jen Arsenault, who spent years sifting through store shelves for delicious staples like the ones handmade by her mother’s family in South Korea, Potluck has launched with two countertop essentials – Gochujang, a spicy, savoury and sweet cooking paste, and Ssamjang, a concentrated, no-cook, stir-together sauce. Each of Potluck’s products is made in small batches in South Korea using traditional methods with cotton cloths, ceramic pots and iron cauldrons. This handmade, artisanal quality of the brand shines through in its identity by Boston-based design studio Regrets Only. Potluck’s resulting brand is a sum of many parts. “Both the name ‘Potluck’ and Korean cuisine are about bringing different things together,” Founder & Creative Director Caleb Halter tells us. “While immersing ourselves in the project, we were struck by bojagi – traditional Korean wrapping clothes – and how, as an art form, it is about stitching together disparate pieces of fabric to create beautiful, varied, and complex compositions, which felt like a beautiful metaphor for the brand.” Inspired by the make of the tapestries, the studio created a gridded, compartmentalised visual system for the brand, which is meant to evoke the feeling of “a gathering – of ingredients, dishes, and people, creating a unique and more flavourful whole,” adds Halter. A rich palette of colours, picked to reflect the breadth of flavour that makes up Korean cuisine, brightens the brand and gives the packaging its luminosity. To balance the colour and personality, Regrets Only chose Dinamo’s utilitarian Oracle as the hero typeface, paired with Source Han Sans for the text in Hangul, which shares a similar weight and geometry. While the typefaces bring structure to Potluck’s look, a palette of textures – from crayon squiggles to patterns reminiscent of honeycomb packing paper – amplifies the focus on craft.