SHIO’s identity for FMYAYA is made to grow alongside future collections

FMYAYA is a contemporary object company making collectable pieces that aim to bring playfulness into everyday life. Berlin-based creative studio SHIO created its identity as an evolving creative system that will grow alongside future collections, with room to shift in tone from one to the next while still looking cohesive. The remit ran from visual identity and packaging to editorial, motion, OOH, e-commerce and launch campaign. “From the beginning, we knew we wanted to build an object brand rather than just launch a single product,” the FMYAYA team tells us. “What we didn’t know yet was what that brand should actually look and feel like.” SHIO led the creative direction, art direction and development of the visual system, with FMYAYA closely involved in the creative conversations throughout. FMYAYA chose bonsai as the theme for its first collection, inspired by the relationship that a bonsai can develop with the person who lives with it – asking for patience, attention and care, and offering something calming and restorative in return. SHIO began the identity from a simple belief – objects deserve personalities. “We wanted the identity to feel playful and a little unexpected, a little weird, but also timeless enough that the objects could still take centre stage,” the FMYAYA team adds. Magazines and bold packaging are among the things that the studio collects. “We kept coming back to editorial publishing, record sleeves and printed ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, not because we wanted to recreate that era, but because there was a graphic confidence to those references that still feels relevant today,” explains Piebee Hsu, Creative Director & Media Artist at SHIO. “They embraced variation without losing coherence, and that balance became an important reference point for us.”