NINELIVES Boba

The Premise: Every boba shop has the same one-dimensional aesthetic: pastel pink, soft handwritten fonts, and a smiling tapioca mascot. The strategy came down to asking: since every other shop is doing the same thing, why not just do the opposite?

Inverting Category Conventions: I swapped pastels for black and red, bubbly fonts for a sharp grotesk, and a smiling mascot for a deadpan cat. Its turned-away posture embodies the emotional register of the brand, which is elegant, a little defiant, and a little unbothered. The cat isn’t trying to be edgy, it just is.

Color Psychology: Red is the only color in the system that isn’t black or white. Psychologically, red stimulates hunger and is associated with sweetness and indulgence. Pink would have leaned generic and undersold the experimental menu, but red is a little jarring—it stands out and sells it.

Shape as Identity: The cup sleeve uses a cat-ear silhouette to identify the brand at a glance and give the cup a reason to exist in someone’s camera roll. It turns a disposable item into a recognizable object, so a cup walking through a crowd reads as NINELIVES from a distance even when the logo isn’t visible.

Merchandise as a Philosophy: The tote bag repeats “I HAVE NINE LIVES” six times down the front to mirror a mantra. Branding it with the logo would have been overkill; in this case, the line is the logo. People carrying it are internalizing a personal philosophy and a confidence call rather than just advertising a boba shop.

Emotional Contrast: The Dark Neko plush is soft, collectible, and kawaii-coded, which contrasts with the aloofness of the rest of the brand. A brand built purely on edge gets tiring fast because there’s nowhere for the customer to land emotionally. The plush gives customers a soft relationship with the brand without the brand itself going soft, while acting as a smart point-of-sale object that taps into existing boba customer habits.

Platforming Cultural Roots: The first advert features a wedding photograph of a Taiwanese couple with the bride in a qipao, holding two boba cups with the line “TO HAVE AND TO HOLD.” Boba is Taiwanese specifically, which often gets flattened into “Asian.” The advert ensures that even when the brand is doing something contemporary and novel, it is openly platforming its roots instead of pretending it came from nowhere.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration: The second advert is a conceptual NINELIVES x Baileys spiked hot chocolate boba. The billboard shows a subject mid-night-out with the line “GETTING SIP-FACED.” I chose Baileys instead of something closer to boba’s cultural neighborhood (like soju) to show that boba can play alongside other cultures without getting swallowed up by them. NINELIVES owns the collaboration, and that dynamic is what makes it work.