Meet Our Mascot: Imouri-Chan!
HELLO, IMOURI-CHAN
We're so happy to introduce you to, Imouri-Chan, the official mascot of Imouri! She tends to have a positive attitude about most anything that comes her way and makes a habit out of giving people nicknames. Always full of ideas, Imouri-Chan is a creative soul that finds happiness in designing clothing with her friends.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
It was not a matter of "if," but "when" we would have a mascot. We knew we wanted a character that could truly embody the same energy and passion we put behind everything that we do here. Imouri-Chan was the answer. When we saw her final design come together, we could not have been happier with how she completely captures that essence. From the bold red hair, bright blue eyes and her lively pose and expression, just looking at Imouri-Chan makes us happy and we hope you feel that same sense of joy.
The whole design process started early in April 2019. The concept of Imouri-Chan was concrete by that point. We had colors in mind, her whole personality on lock and pose ideas ready to try. Originally, we started our own renderings, but after two collection launches from earlier in the year and having just designed a million graphics for the Imouri brand we would soon be launching, we were creatively burned out. This lead us to make the decision to seek out a set of second eyes that could properly bring our vision to life in the midst of a busy transition period for us. After hearing and seeing great things from a studio in Singapore called Collateral Damage Studios (CDS), we immediately reached out and never looked back. Together with the team at CDS, we began the creatives in May and the whole process moved at lightspeed. We finished the first set of sketches in less than a week and edited accordingly from there.
Following some back and forth on edits, we started to hone in on a final look for Imouri-Chan. Her hair was actually much longer in the beginning, but something about going shorter felt right. Once we cleaned up some areas with finer details, we went on to render out a pre-line art front and back sketch for approval.
By this point, we were in awe at how it was all coming together. It was time to move onto final line art for all of the poses and more importantly, the colorization. Coloring went through one major change. We knew we wanted to incorporate the bright pinky-red color we have on our website and in our logo, however, in the first round of coloring, it was well beyond overused. We toned it down in the beginning, wondering if the exact red-pink color we use would be too "in your face," but in the final renderings, you can see we ended up placing focus on our exact signature bold red-pink color almost exclusively on the hair. It can be seen in a few other details too, like the hair tie on her left hand.
Jump to the present! Imouri-chan is here. A special thank you goes out again to the team at CDS (thanks, KC!) for helping us bring this project to life.
Expect to see more of Imouri-Chan in the near future!
❤️ Ryan