Saint-Urbain builds Gap Tooth Soda around imperfection as a principle

Owen Walker, founder of the Toronto-based botanical soda brand GAPTOOTH, has an actual gap between his front teeth that he’d spent years hiding behind closed-mouth smiles and daydreams of orthodontic symmetry. He came round to it eventually, and the trait he had once wanted to engineer away became the seed of a brand built around imperfection as a starting point. Roughly a quarter of the global population shares the same dental feature. Saint-Urbain, the independent strategy and design studio founded in Montreal and based in New York, built the wider brand world from naming and strategy through identity, packaging and motion. Underneath the loose, hand-drawn surface sits a disciplined system. The wordmark position, can architecture and hierarchy stay locked across every touchpoint, with the expressive choices happening only inside that frame. “Without that structural floor, the whole thing would collapse into noise,” explains Alex Ostroff, Founder & Creative Director at Saint-Urbain. Set in all caps and slightly condensed, the custom wordmark looks visibly drawn, with baselines stopping short of perfect alignment. The O’s are just off-round and the terminals carry a handmade wobble. Earlier versions pushed the gap-tooth logic further, with wider letter-spacing and more exaggerated voids, but those versions started to tip toward visual pun. Saint-Urbain pulled back, trusting the name to carry the weight. Agipo, in Bold and Regular, picks up the rest of the typographic load across cans, flavour descriptors and campaigns, holding the line on clarity while the wordmark carries the warmth. “If everything had personality, nothing would stand out,” Ostroff notes.