OFTENTIMES, THE BEST STUFF HAPPENS FOR ME BECAUSE THERE ARE NO REAL RESTRICTIONS OR REAL UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT THE LIMITATIONS ARE.

UNKL came out of a need from within our design firm, Big-Giant, to explore design solutions without real consequences. We were looking for something that wasn’t a client situation where we’re dealing with the weight of someone else’s business. We didn’t initially intend for UNKL to be a business as much as a creative outlet for ourselves and our employees, but in the end, each business fed the other creatively. It came around full circle for us, to be able to consider how the brand of UNKL can exist and how the products can exist with-in that brand.

Opportunities arise for many different projects that are not really based on formal training or experience but on a willingness to give it a shot. Oftentimes, the best stuff happens for me because there are no real restrictions or a real understanding of what the limitations are. You just go for it and let it happen. It’s less about thinking what the rules are and what the parameters are and more about just creating.

With UNKL, we originally wanted to design spaces and furniture, but it became too costly and time-consuming to pull off. Then Jason and I started developing stories with characters, and we found that they are much easier to achieve—especially on the manufacturing end. Toys are practically free compared to constructing a building.

Jason and I formed Big-Giant in 1999. While we worked on big and small brands for many industries, we tried to create an environment where the creative process is as important as the work we do.

Jason and I had worked at Nike, but we recognized other opportunities that went beyond the scope of what Nike was doing. We realized we could do our thing with any kind of company across disciplines. We could do things that would challenge us creatively and business-wise. As time went on, we started getting bogged down in the client process, and that’s where UNKL came into play.

With UNKL, the more we did, the more we realized that there were limitations. For example, we started out designing furniture, buildings, and spaces, but they were too hard to pull off from a cost and time standpoint. It started getting too complicated, and we were losing the focus of being purely creative.

A lot of UNKL exposure has brought work to Big-Giant. For example, a fan of UNKL called and wanted a robot created for the identity of his company. He wanted something original. That was an opportunity for us to talk about Big-Giant and all the design and branding work we do here. This was great because this guy was already into our personal style and we could leverage that to create his identity. That allowed us a certain amount of creative freedom that we might not typically have.

UNKL is about doing things we have always wanted to do. The only limitations have been time and money. Creatives always have a lot of ideas kicking around in their sketchbooks, but not the money or time to execute them. UNKL is the green light to do whatever we want.

Within the characters, a lot of stuff is specific to Jason’s or my point of view that we could inject into the big picture and it all still works. For example, one of the characters is wearing a hat like the Pope would wear, but the iconography on the front of the character is science-related. You could construe this as a commentary on science and religion. It’s a platform for us to address issues, concerns, likes, and dislikes. And we treat it in a lighthearted way.

These Tinpo characters came out of sketching and drawing one character over and over again, probably out of habit more than anything else. The big news story at that time was about cloning sheep, and that influenced our story and the concept for these characters. A lot of people were discussing whether cloning was ethical. It was a serious subject matter, so we decided to poke fun at it by creating these characters that draft off one form. Each character has its own personality, but they all look like they’re part of the same family. The story is that they were created in a lab and then cloned using gerbil DNA, and that’s why they’re so small.

HazMaPo was the first toy we released. We wanted something that had an aggressive point of view but was still approachable. It’s that juxtaposition of them wearing gas masks and clothes and then being painted in bright yellow or orange or pink that makes our point—the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” metaphor.