Miloh Shop

Miloh Shop is a Vancouver, BC shop stocking world-renown menswear brands, with a strong focus on Americana as seen though the lens of Japan. I worked with the owner, Kevin, to build Miloh Shop’s visual identity from the ground up. We started with the logo mark and went on to create additional designs for the physical store, ranging from eye-catching window signage down to small printed goods.

The Brief

A couple years back, Kevin and I brushed elbows in a niche online community—okay, it was a subreddit—about handrafted footwear. He didn’t know me, but I’d admired his photography and footwear collection (particularly photography of his footwear collection), so when Kevin announced he’d be opening a menswear shop, I sprang at the chance to lend a hand. His shop needed an identity, and I’d been hoping to bridge the gap between design and my interests, so it was crazy serendipitous.

There wasn’t much time before Miloh Shop would open its doors, so we prioritized the logo and word marks to get it ready for launch, and continued to extend the identity over the coming weeks and months.

Logo Mark

Kevin wanted the logo mark to be a wolf or dog of some kind, not entirely unlike his own pint-sized Alaskan Klee Kai, Milo. So I thought, why not have her be the mark?

But both were too detailed to work. Even the simpler of the two wouldn’t work when shrunk down to fit the header of a website, or on a business card.

It wasn’t entirely fruitless, though. What I liked about the sketches was the near 50/50 relationship of positive to negative space. It spoke to some of the early references Kevin had sent when we were first talking, that moody interplay between light and dark.

I kept sketching, now with more confidence in the direction. My sketch process is the definition of interative: sketch, duplicate it, sketch on it more, duplicate it, etc.

For the last sketch, I inverted half of the wolf’s face, giving the effect of being half in shadow, but with a luminous eye still peeking out. Kevin was also into it, so I pressed on and refined it into what became the final logo mark.

Because the mark reads best when contrasted against a lighter background, we also wanted an alternate version that would work when placed on a dark background.

Word Mark

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Lettering is my hammer; it’s pleasantly weighty, has an ergonomic grip, and by golly is it fun to swing.

So with a Japanese calligraphy pen in hand, I took to my dot-grid Field Notes and tried to see what would pair best with the wolf logo.

But but it turns out lettering wasn’t the tool for the job. The logo mark already had enough curvy lines of its own, and equally-curvy lettering would only distract from it. What it needed was the structure of a low contrast sans-serif, something architectural. Porter fit the bill nicely: all-caps, three weights, and zero fuss.

Additional Materials

Once we had the logo squared away, we extended it to the glass door and main window, using the “inverted” version of the logo to increase visibilty. Additionally, I designed business cards, a wooden “sandwich board” to display outside the shop, a Miloh-branded rubber stamp for adding flair to shipments, and artwork concepts for an upcoming collaboration with a brand already stocked by Kevin.