NINELIVES
Boba

I love boba. I drink a lot of it, which means I've been in a lot of boba shops. And at some point I realized I couldn't tell any of them apart. They all had the pastel pink, soft handwritten font, and smiling tapioca mascot. They all seemed like the same shop with different owners, twelve times over. The category had become a one-dimensional aesthetic and I hadn't seen anyone design an alternative yet.

The strategy came down to this: every other boba shop is doing the same thing, so just do the opposite. I swapped pastels for black and red, swapped bubbly hand-drawn fonts for a sharp grotesk, and swapped a smiling tapioca mascot for a deadpan cat that looks like it would rather not make eye contact with you. Every category convention I could identify, I inverted.

Cats are everywhere in boba branding though, so the difference had to be the kind of cat. I didn't want a friendly mascot, I wanted one with its own internal life that seemed unconcerned with whether it was understood or not. The turned-away posture and low-lidded eyes embody the emotional register of the brand, which is elegant, a little defiant, and a little unbothered. I had several versions with angry eyebrows early on and cut them. The rationale ended up being that the cat isn't trying to be edgy, it just is.

The name came to mind while designing the icon. NINELIVES is about reinvention and the humor of survival. Every new idea is another life, and the brand is a love letter to a cycle of indulgence, collapse, and revival with one cup, one life at a time. It's a play on the menu that has decadent dessert flavors like red cheesecake boba that's so sinful that it feels like it might take one of your lives with it.

For the color, red is the only one in the system that isn't black, white, or off-white. Psychologically, red works really well for stimulating hunger, and it's associated with sweetness and indulgence. It mirrors what's in the cup since the menu is rich, dessert-leaning, and experimental. Pink would have leaned generic and undersold it, but red is a little jarring, it stands out and sells it.

The cup sleeve was an early decision because it had to identify the brand at a glance and give the cup a reason to exist in someone's camera roll, and the cat-ear silhouette covers both because it turns a disposable item into a recognizable object, so the shape becomes the brand even when the logo isn't visible. A cup walking through a crowd reads as NINELIVES from a distance.

Merchandise is how NINELIVES lives in someone's apartment, on their shoulder, or on their bed. It's how the brand stops being a one or two-time transaction and starts being something the customer chooses to commit to.

The tote repeats "I HAVE NINE LIVES" six times down the front. The repetition is supposed to mirror a mantra, and it also doubles as a reference to the brand name itself, copying the idea of multiple lives just like multiple prints. Branding it with the logo would have been overkill, but in this case the line is the logo. People who choose to own the tote aren't "advertising" a boba shop in the traditional sense, they're internalizing the phrase and declaring their own cheeky, slightly sardonic personalities. Humans unfortunately only have one life, but carrying around a tote that says "I have nine" doubles as a personal philosophy or confidence call.

The Dark Neko plush being soft and cute is in contrast to the rest of the brand system on purpose. Everything else about NINELIVES is a bit aloof and lacks friendly warmth, but the Dark Neko is soft, collectible, kawaii-coded, and that contrast is what makes the system feel alive rather than stiff or uncompromising one-note. A brand built on edge would get tiring fast, because there's nowhere for the customer to land emotionally, but the Dark Neko lets people who love the brand have a soft relationship with it without the brand itself going soft. It's also strategically sharp as a point-of-sale object since boba customers already buy plushies, so the Dark Neko just expands on that behavior.

The first advert is a wedding photograph of a Taiwanese couple with the bride in a qipao instead of a traditional western wedding dress. They're holding two boba cups between them with the line "TO HAVE AND TO HOLD" laid across them in the brand's signature red. I wanted to highlight the cultural aspect because boba is Taiwanese specifically, and that often gets flattened into "Asian" or attributed to China generally. Putting the couple in traditional dress isn't just prettier imagery, it's a way of making sure that even when NINELIVES is doing something contemporary and novel, the brand is still openly platforming its roots instead of pretending it came from nowhere.

The second advert is a conceptual product extension: a limited edition NINELIVES x Baileys spiked hot chocolate boba, 18+. The billboard advertisement is the subject mid-night-out with a NINELIVES cup in one hand and a bottle of Baileys in the other, and the line "GETTING SIP-FACED" across the image. Launching a spiked flavor tracks with where the brand was already headed since the menu is indulgent enough that an alcoholic version isn't a stretch. I chose Baileys specifically and not a cream liqueur soju or something closer to boba's own cultural neighborhood because the cross-cultural reference shows that boba can play alongside other cultures without getting swallowed up by them, because NINELIVES is the one owning the collaboration, and that dynamic is what makes it work.