In early December 2025, I was personally invited by the Managing Director of HARIO Shanghai to design a limited edition Year of the Horse V60 Immersion Dripper RAN — a piece co-developed with Yasuo Suzuki, the Nagoya-based founder of Trunk Coffee and creator of the ORIGAMI dripper.
The brief came with a hard constraint: final artwork needed to be shortlisted, revised, and signed off by the first week of January 2026, ahead of China's Chinese New Year holidays in order to make the production timeline.
The real challenge wasn't just the timeline. HARIO Shanghai's Year of the Snake dripper in 2025 had moved barely 100 units across one of the world's largest markets. Cute, mass-market zodiac aesthetics hadn't worked — and zodiac merchandise is brutally time-sensitive. If it reads too "Chinese New Year," the shelf life dies with the season and virtually unsellable in markets that doesn't celebrate it.
Design Process & Approach
My first decision was to throw out the conventional zodiac playbook entirely. Instead of designing for maximum accessibility, I designed for conviction — and for a specific audience that I knew existed but wasn't being spoken to: the overlap between specialty coffee enthusiasts and people drawn to wellness culture, analog aesthetics, and tattoo-adjacent art.
The visual anchor became the Tarot archetype of The Chariot (VII) — a symbol of controlled duality, opposing forces held in productive tension. The illustration style followed from there: medieval linocut, thick and tactile, the kind of line work that feels hand-pulled rather than screen-printed. It sits in the same visual world as neo-traditional tattoo flash, woodblock prints, and the kind of analog craft that specialty coffee culture already romanticises.
I also made a conscious call to design packaging that matched the weight of the product — nothing was outsourced to Shanghai.
On top of the illustration and packaging, I handled product photography and built the entire go-to-market strategy for Southeast Asia from scratch: e-commerce with a preorder pricing structure to manufacture early hype, a TikTok preorder live, and a KOL seeding programme across Singapore and Malaysia targeting creators at exactly that specialty coffee × lifestyle × wellness intersection.
Outcome & Reflections
With no historical demand data to rely on, the V60 Dripper RAN Celestial Zodiac represented a calculated product-development risk for HARIO Asia. We had never previously stocked a zodiac dripper in Southeast Asia, as comparable limited-edition releases had consistently underperformed in Shanghai, leaving us with no meaningful benchmark against which to forecast regional demand.
Despite this, the initial 108 units allocated to HARIO Asia sold out entirely through pre-orders ahead of the official launch.
The launch was supported by a visual campaign that I creatively directed. With zero paid media, the Instagram announcement generated approximately 23,000 impressions—6.6 times our typical baseline. Likes increased by approximately 14.4 times, while shares rose by 31.4 times compared with an average post.
The campaign also gained significant organic traction beyond Southeast Asia. The visuals were shared by Yasuo Suzuki, reused by the HARIO Shanghai team across Instagram and Xiaohongshu, and generated inbound enquiries from customers in Europe and North America.
Following the Southeast Asian pre-release through HARIO’s official direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, the dripper made its official debut at World of Coffee Bangkok 2026, where the full 504-unit show allocation sold out. The product was subsequently exported to HARIO’s distributors in Indonesia and the Philippines, demonstrating that its appeal extended beyond a conventional zodiac-themed release and translated into broader commercial demand across the region.
As Seen On Social Media, An Excerpt
What I took away from this: a strong, specific design perspective is more commercially viable than designing for everyone. The Year of the Snake dripper tried to appeal broadly and barely moved 100 units in the world's largest market. This one leaned into an unexpected aesthetic with a defined point of view — and the audience found it.
The other thing I learnt, the harder way: being a one-person team across creative, production, and commercial is only sustainable if the organisation eventually builds the infrastructure to support it. The work proved the model. Now someone needs to resource it properly.
The other thing I learnt, the harder way: being a one-person team across creative, production, and commercial is only sustainable if the organisation eventually builds the infrastructure to support it. The work proved the model. Now someone needs to resource it properly.
Chang-Ming
KO
Regional business developer by day,
Multi-disciplinary designer 24/7
Chang-Ming
KO
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