A hot sauce whose brand melts the closer you look.
Result — sold into 7 retail chains. Below: the heat scale, mild to feral.
01 — The brief
A craft hot sauce drowning in a category of cartoon chillies and novelty skulls. Great product, juvenile shelf presence. Buyers wouldn’t take it seriously enough to stock it.
The brief: make heat feel premium and dangerous, not goofy. "We want it to look like it could actually hurt you."
Heat isn’t a flavor. It’s a threat.
02 — The idea
The hotter it gets, the more the type loses control.
We built the identity as a heat scale you can read at a glance. Five letters, weaponised by temperature — as the Scoville count climbs, the wordmark stretches, skews and hazes over, so the label warns you a beat before the sauce does. It holds its nerve at MILD and comes completely apart at FERAL.
01 · Mild
2,500 SHU
Garden heat with a wink. The type stands to attention — clean, sharp, fully in control.
02 · Hot
75,000 SHU
Now it's sweating. Letters lean and stretch, the edges start to smear — the warning is on.
03 · Feral
1.2M SHU
Past the point of words. The mark melts off its own baseline — call it a label, call it a threat.
Same five letters, three threat levels — the label melts so the buyer knows before the tongue does. Hover a tier; feel it flinch.
03 — The work
Fig. 01 — Bottle hero, dramatic light
Fig. 02 — Chili macro
Fig. 03 — Plated food
Fig. 04 — Retail shelf
04 — The result
national retail chains, sold in
shelf price vs. category average
to clear the first production run
Next — 06 / MONOLITH