Sooki is both the founders’ nickname for their mother, and the name Joseph and Hannah Choi gave to the Korean sesame oil they spent years developing at their family mill in South Korea.
The oil is roasted at lower temperatures and pressed without solvents, which gives it a golden colour distinct from the deep amber familiar on American shelves. The Chois wanted the brand to register that distinction before anyone had tasted a drop, and commissioned The Collected Works to make it visible through the brand design.
The studio’s response is built around a character. Sooki herself appears on the front of the label as a small, round-cheeked figure in a red headscarf, drawn by the studio’s designer Zedan. She is joined by a wider cast – Sooki Boy, an animated egg, a sheet of stickers populated with skewers, noodle bowls, kimbap and dumplings – all rendered in the same hand-drawn style. The illustration system carries the family story and gives the identity a tactility that the more typographic conventions of the category tend not to offer.
“We always knew there should be an illustrated component to the system, and that a hand-done touch was incredibly important,” Justin Colt, Partner & Creative Director at The Collected Works, explains. The studio worked closely on texture and materiality across the wordmark, the illustration set and the linen-finish label, with the aim of bringing warmth forward rather than reaching for vintage shorthand. “We definitely didn’t want to imitate vintage tropes or make this feel overtly old-fashioned,” Colt adds.
The wordmark sits below the illustration in a condensed, slab-influenced display cut, set in a saturated red and finished with a halftone texture that gives it the appearance of a printed stamp. A small Hangul lockup sits to the right of the final ‘I,’ reading 수기. Colt is candid about the practical work the wordmark had to do: the labels are small, and the brand needed to be legible on a shelf at arm’s length. “That made more condensed directions feel like a requirement,” he tells us. The rounded terminals soften the slab construction enough to key into the illustration system, and the Hangul lockup was important to the founders as a way of holding the oil’s Korean origin on the front of the bottle.
Beyond the wordmark, the broader typographic system is set in Pangram Pangram’s Gatwick, chosen for the range of weights it offered across the packaging, marketing and editorial contexts. It carries the brand’s louder moments – the ‘Tiny Seeds, Massive Flex’ headline that runs across promotional materials – as well as the smaller utility text on the label.
The colour decisions are where the project’s central tension shows up most plainly. The studio’s first instinct was to push toward fluorescents on the basis that a countertop product needs to compete with everything else already on the counter. That direction gave way once the more nostalgic concept began to take hold. The palette landed on red, white and blue, and the studio noticed mid-process that the combination referenced both the South Korean and American flags.
The Collected Works tested labels on shelves and countertops at arm’s length, working through paper stocks and printing techniques until the red sat correctly against the natural gold of the oil itself. The bottle, sourced and sampled by the founders, is a small, weighted piece of glass with a wooden cap that the studio used as a constant for label trials. “We really love that the bottle is relatively small. It fits nicely in your hand, and the glass adds a nice weight that makes it feel like it has a sense of authority,” Colt tells us.
The category gave the studio its sharpest brief by way of contrast. Sesame oil branding tends to converge on a small set of visual conventions, with similar bottle shapes, amber palettes, and heritage cues – but the founders had already identified the gap before commissioning the work. The studio presented a range of routes, some more directly referential to Korean design motifs, others further away. The final identity sits closer to the middle, letting the illustration system do the cultural work that a more literal approach would have handled with calligraphy or hanji texture.
Joseph Choi describes the moment the bottle landed for him as a quiet one in his Los Angeles backyard, the sun catching the glass at the right angle. “We were especially proud of how the label complements the natural golden colour of the oil,” he tells us. “We wanted people to have a direct, almost face-to-face experience with the oil itself, to really see its beautiful golden colour, quality and richness.”
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Content taken from Sooki
