Premium metal drinkware with the geometry of an engine. The garage already worked out what metal should look like after it has been used, so Gearbox took the forms instead of inventing new ones.
Role
Creative Direction · Brand Identity · Industrial Design
Project
Self-Initiated Concept
Industry
Lifestyle · Drinkware · Automotive
Deliverables
Identity · Packaging · Product · Campaign
Tools
Brand Design · Art-Directed AI Imaging
The product was never the problem. It was the world around it.
Challenge
A full product line that existed only as drawings, and no budget to build the world it had to be sold in.
Approach
Build the brand as if the products had already shipped. Names, palette, type and packaging all drawn from the place the forms came from.
Outcome
Twelve pieces, two kits, a packaging architecture and a full lifestyle campaign.
First attempt · 2017
2017. Dimension lines and all.
I photoshopped a five piece collection in 2017 and waited for the right tools to tell the full story. Without physical prototypes and a real shoot budget I could not build the lifestyle campaign this brand needed: vintage cars, poolside scenes, bar setups.
The forms had to work before the brand could.
The full lockup. The O is a cog, the X is two wedges meeting.
The wordmark. Compressed, tight, and built to hold at small sizes.
Reduced to one cog. Small sizes get the part, not the word.
Matte black, raw aluminum, oxidized bronze. Finishes, not colors.
Branded pattern. Gear silhouettes on a checkerboard.
Letterhead. A fingerprint under a scribe.
Letterpress card. The rosette carries the brand wherever the wordmark will not fit.
The unboxing kit. The letter, the keyring, the card and the profile all have to sound like the same company.
Strategic insight
Gearbox feels like one brand because every decision points the same way.
The names come from the garage. The palette reads like a parts catalog. The type is compressed and tight, set like it was stamped into metal rather than printed. None of it is decoration. It all describes the same world, which is usually the thing a concept is missing.
The range is also built to be sold, not only looked at. It splits into three so it has a shape on a shelf: glassware, bar tools, and the caddy. The packaging has to read from across an aisle before it has to read in your hand. And the caddy holds glasses the customer already owns, because a line that only works if you buy all of it does not work.
The Foundry · Glassware
The shaker. Stacked gear bodies.
Coil handled stein, gear, golden hour.
The pour. Gear spout, salted rims.
Piston stem, shaker, hex flask. Oxblood hood.
The Shift Kit · Bar tools
Laid out like a parts tray. Bar tools drawn straight from the toolbox. Precision served.
Every tool is a part first and a tool second.
Titanium ice, cast as gears and sprockets. Even the garnish is machined.
The Bracket · Wine caddy
The deck. Sprocket, chain and the etched mark, machined flat because the magnets need a clean surface.
The bottle drops through a cut slot. The deck is magnetic, so any Gearbox piece parks on it and stays there, and slits along the edge hold ordinary stemware by the foot.
Magnets for the line, slots for everything else, because the person you are pouring for should not have to own the brand.
A piston bodied corkscrew holds itself to the deck. No hook, no rack, nothing to lose.
In service. An ordinary glass hangs by its foot from a cut slit.
The concept looked like a concept. Then it didn't.
Each box carries the silhouette of what is inside. Stacked, the line reads as one wall.
The marker icons. One per product, so the system scales.
The Piston.
The Torque, beside the tankard it holds.
The pattern at shelf distance. The gear still reads.
Coil stem cup, metal straw. Drinkware as culture, not inventory.
Car rim ice bucket, poolside. The part outlives the car.
Gear ring tankard, coil handle, desert patio. The world the 2017 version never got to have.
Coil spring stems on a pool deck. The palette holds in full sun.
On method. I learn things. Video editing, 3D, licensing, whatever the year seems to be asking for. In 2025 I watched the HOW conference, the way I do every year, and AI was the entire conversation. I had reservations. I also had no interest in holding an opinion about something I had never used. So I pulled Gearbox out of the folder and made it the thing I learned on.
The brand had been finished for eight years by then: the mark, the products, the packaging system, the world. What was new was directing a scene without a camera. The light, the angle, the placement, the reflection on metal. Getting it to a place I would put my name on took a lot longer than I expected. I use these tools for research and thinking now, not for making. Every craft I care about has outlived a new machine before. I am betting this one does too.
Every project on this site started with an email.
