Previous experiences

The crayon drop was centred around the theme of “nostalgia”, so naturally the entire website lives inside a Windows XP desktop. You log in at the classic welcome screen, and the store, lookbook, collection, account page and past collections are all real apps inside the environment. There's even MS Paint, a deliberately boring store page and plenty of other little easter eggs to find. We hope it makes you feel youthful again, Bliss background, startup sound and all.

Makkuro was in lieu’s first time doing an all black collection, themed around “makkuro”: the beloved Soot Sprites from the Studio Ghibli films My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Spirited Away (2001). The home page featured a calming furry marimo drifting in the dark, designed to feel as soft as the alpaca avril from the collection. Further down were stories from our ceramicist Caitlin Robson and our good friend and bonsai artist Billy Ho from Tildy Bonsai Studios.

The time in lieu drop was all about taking time off to enjoy the nicer things in life. It opened to an airport departure board: 216 split flaps rattling through the orders as they landed, como, lyon, shion and the kyoho avery each departing under their own flight number (which were the actual order numbers). Every row was a real order and the archive replays them!

The original avery collection is where in lieu started. The website at the time was incredibly basic, but we had a strong story and theme behind it: a super playful collection with three key archetypes supporting the release. A saxophonist “Stephen” who we call Abeoji, a pastry chef Joseph (Talin from the team’s dad) and our good friend and incredible artist Chrissy each showed off their talents in our campaign videos. We decided to make an interactive front page where you can click on the individual items to learn their stories, with quotes from our archetypes.