Building a brand from zero: what I learned running Lapatzak

Lapatzak started as a side project and became the most educational thing I've done. Not because it succeeded (it did, modestly) but because I had to own every decision — from the logo to the shipping boxes.

Identity is 10% of the work

The logo, the colors, the typography — I designed those in a week. The brand? That took months. A brand is how the packaging feels in your hand. How the unboxing experience unfolds. What the confirmation email says. Whether the Instagram caption sounds like a human or a marketing team.

The visual identity is the easy part. The hard part is consistency across 50 touchpoints that no one tells you about.

Packaging taught me more than design school

Designing for print is humbling. Your beautiful 2px line doesn't exist at that resolution. Your carefully chosen Pantone shifts 3 tones when printed on kraft paper. The dieline has folds that cut through your logo. I learned more about production constraints in one packaging project than in four years of screen design.

E-commerce is logistics, not design

The Shopify store took a week to set up. The shipping integration, inventory tracking, returns process, and customer service workflows took three months. The design of the site matters — but it's maybe 15% of what makes an e-commerce brand work. The rest is operations.

What I'd do differently

Start with the supply chain, not the brand deck. Find the manufacturer first. Understand the margins. Then design the identity around what's actually producible. I did it backwards and paid for it in rework.

Running a brand end-to-end made me a better creative director. Not because of the design work — but because I now understand every layer underneath it.