Much Gay began life as a tongue-in-cheek design experiment — a space where I could explore identity, humour, and product culture without the constraints of “traditional” branding. The project let me lean into boldness: bold shapes, bold colours, bold statements. Underneath all of that, though, was a proper exploration of what makes a brand feel alive. It was a sandbox where I could test how far minimalism, maximalism, and modern packaging could be pushed before they snapped.

As the project grew, I treated it like a fully fledged consumer brand. That meant refining the visual language, building digital and print assets, mapping out how the brand would behave across an online store layout, and prototyping e-commerce touchpoints. Everything from product mock-ups to environmental graphics became part of the world-building. The fun part was balancing the louder-than-life personality with genuinely clean, commercially viable design — the sort you could imagine on a shelf next to established brands but still instantly recognise as something different.

Much Gay ended up becoming a bit of a playground for systems thinking too. Packaging hierarchies, label consistency, iconography rules, and scalability across dozens of SKUs. The whole thing doubled as a technical exercise in how to build a brand that feels spontaneous but operates with structure. Built with saleability in mind, Much Gay was sold in 2020. Now it stands in the portfolio as a reminder that playful ideas can still show serious design discipline — and that the best work often happens when you give yourself room to push boundaries with purpose.