CASE · BRAND + CREATIVE DIRECTION · BAJAKU

Urban apparel startup brand designed to be modern and timeless.

As freelance creative director for Bajaku International, I took an original character ink sketch and delivered an urban apparel brand.

Role
Brand Consultant & Creative Director
Organization
Bajaku International
Engagement
Since 2003
Focus
Identity · Apparel · Packaging · Direct Mail
5 surfaces
Apparel graphics, packaging, patches, direct mail, and corporate identity on one mark
Registered
Wordmark and character mark secured as a protectable company asset
20+ years
The client relationship has held since 2003
★ The work

The graphic, the mail piece, and the tag on the garment — all reading as one brand.

Bajaku sold an original character universe as physical product. The same mark had to hold on a full-process apparel graphic, on a chest print separated for a two-color screen, on a hangtag with a scannable barcode, and on a mail piece at postcard scale. Swipe through the finished pieces below.

Necropolis cover art: the Bajaku mask character in the foreground against a ruined clock tower and night skyline
Full color Bajaku character illustration: a figure in a hooded coat holding a large disc against a graffitied brick wall
Bajaku direct mail postcard, front and back: a model in a branded cap and tee against a brick wall, and the What Is Urban headline with an order message
Bajaku hangtag showing the mask character with glowing eyes over a tiled wordmark background
Swipe or use arrows
Fig. 1–4 Apparel graphic, character illustration, the mail piece, and the hangtag.

“What is urban?

The question the direct-mail piece led with, instead of a product shot
03 Process

Five surfaces, four production realities, one mark that had to survive all of them.

Bajaku was going to market in several categories at once on a startup timeline, with product turning over faster than any one-off design pass could keep up with. The risk wasn't a weak logo. It was drift: every new SKU arriving with its own interpretation of the brand, until the company read as five brands by the end of the first season.

Friction A
Everything launched at once

Apparel graphics, packaging, patches, mail, and the corporate face of the company all needed finished artwork on the same timeline.

Friction B
Every vendor a different process

Screen printers wanted spot-color separations, full-color graphics ran process, retail needed a scannable barcode, offset needed its own prep.

Friction C
No system for the next SKU

Without a repeatable framework, each new product restarted the brand conversation from scratch.

A

Build the identity on the character, not the type

The mask carries the brand where a wordmark can't — on a chest print, on a hangtag, ghosted across a letterhead, shrunk onto a neck label. Anchoring recognition to a face rather than a logotype meant the identity survived any size and any color count.

B

Draw once, ship to every production reality

  • Supplied both separations from one drawing. The screen patch shipped as a spot-color and a full-process version, so the same asset served the low-cost printer and the full-color run without a redraw.
  • Specified the garment, not just the graphic. Neck label, hangtag, style number BA-0001, UPC, and a placement callout one inch from the neckline — what reached retail was a finished product, not artwork someone still had to interpret.
  • Locked the mark onto every piece. Wordmark, mask, or both appeared in a fixed relationship on each artifact, so unrelated designs still read as one brand on the rack.
C

A sub-brand system instead of one-off graphics

Six Classic patch marks in a mid-century fuel-and-service-station idiom gave the line somewhere to grow. New product could be added by drawing inside an established vocabulary rather than by starting another design conversation — which is what kept the turnover from fragmenting the brand.

The system underneath
Bajaku apparel program sheet: hangtag, neck label with style number and barcode, garment placement diagram, and screen patch artwork in spot color and full process color
Sheet of six Bajaku Classic patch designs in a mid-century fuel and service station idiom
Bajaku business card with the wordmark and character silhouette over a brick texture
Bajaku letterhead with the wordmark, mask mark, and an oversized ghosted mask illustration
Rendered study of the Bajaku mask character mark in grayscale
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Fig. 5–9 The apparel program, the patch system, corporate identity, and the rendered mark it all resolves back to.
D

Putting the brand in the mail

The mail piece led with a positioning question rather than a product shot, and put the garment on a body in the environment the brand had drawn. One card doing brand work and order-taking at the same time — the argument for the line and the means to buy it in the same hand.

04 Results

One brand across every surface, and a relationship that outlasted the project.

Surfaces unified
5
Apparel graphics, retail packaging, patches, direct mail, and corporate identity all resolving to one mark
Relationship
20+ yrs
The working relationship with Bajaku has held since 2003, well past the delivery of the work itself
Protectable asset
Registered marks

Wordmark and character mark secured as something the company owned rather than borrowed.

Room to extend
6 Classic patch marks

A sub-brand vocabulary that absorbed new product without diluting the primary mark.

Retail-ready
Style no. · UPC · placement

Artwork delivered as a finished product spec, not as files a vendor still had to interpret.

Why it mattered

A startup selling into a crowded category doesn't lose on any single piece of artwork. It loses to drift. Treating the character as the load-bearing element, and shipping every mark in the form its vendor actually needed, meant the brand arrived intact in five places at once.