Yiayia and Friends

This is a story about Yiayia. A Greek granny joined by her animal friends spreads the message of family values through food-related stories and experiences conceptualized with a fresh perspective and a sense of humor. At the heart of the design project, "Yiayia" (granny in Greek) is glorified in a key storyline as an all-powerful, all-knowing, but also down to-earth character. Through her and her friends from both the human and animal kingdoms, the arts of growing, cooking, and sharing food together along with everything associated with these activities are remembered, reinterpreted, and redesigned for new generations. The story of yiayia and friends began in 2019, with a radical idea: let's create a brand for food products that will not be a food project but, at heart, a design project. It is an experiment testing the limits of how a meaningful narrative, an idea invested with creative illustrations and expressed in a strong visual language, can grow into a flourishing business. Yiayia and friends would probably never have made it through a standard commercial feasibility analysis, but our creative and professional instincts told us it was a risk worth taking. We chose to initially develop the brand outside of a typical business plan, and this gave us space to fully develop the ethos, the story, the look and feel of the brand first, and then make business decisions. Yiayia and friends reimagines superior quality food products, kitchenware, and other everyday objects, inspired by traditional values and reconceptualized for present-day use.