Sputtens

Turning sock-puppet mittens into a complete character world across product, packaging, play, and merchandise.

Industry

Children’s products / toys

Engagement

Brand, character, product & digital experience

Relationship

Defined project, delivered and handed off

Status

Delivered; product shipped to market

Scope

Character creation, logo, brand identity, product feedback, packaging, labels, website design and development, online activities, Dress-a-Sputten, interactive parallax world, coloring book, illustration, and branded merchandise

The Sputtens character world: a wide snowy illustrated scene with the full cast of characters playing, and SPUTTENS written in the sky

Original character castA family of characters created as the foundation of the brand

Physical product systemIdentity, illustration, tags, packaging and product presentation

Interactive digital worldWebsite, character experiences, activities and illustrated exploration

Beyond the mittensColoring book and further character-based applications

The product idea was playful. The brand world did not exist yet.

Sputtens began as sock-puppet mittens: a simple product idea that turned cold weather into play.

The product needed more than a name and a package. It needed characters, personalities, and a world children could recognize.

Sputtens owned the product and the business. Keeks created the characters, brand, and world around it.

Two pairs of Sputtens sock-puppet mittens on a wood surface: green dinosaur faces and pink bunny faces, one pair still carrying its hangtag

One product, expanding into a world.

Each stage of the work built on the one before it.

01The productSock-puppet mittens designed around play.
02The charactersAn original cast, personalities, illustration language and identity.
03The worldProduct presentation, website, interactive experiences and activities.
04The extensionsColoring book and further character-based applications.

The characters had to belong together without looking the same.

Each Sputten needed its own personality while still feeling like part of one family.

Keeks created the cast, illustration language, logo, and visual rules that allowed the characters to change from scene to scene without losing the world around them.

A framed Winter Wonderland print showing the full Sputtens cast lined up together: bears, bunnies, a giraffe, a dinosaur, a seal, a cat and more

The character development wall: pencil sketches of the cast pinned up with finished coloured characters placed over them

The characters moved back onto the product.

The mittens were the entry point, so the brand had to work on the physical product as clearly as it did in illustration.

Keeks extended the character system across tags, labels, packaging, and product presentation so each pair connected back to the larger Sputtens world.

Two children on a sled in the snow, both wearing Sputtens character mittens

The character tag for Raz and Lou, the green dinosaur pair, giving their names, birthday, favourite colour and a fact, with four illustrated steps for putting the mittens on

The character tag for Ruby and Lioness, the pink cat pair, in the same format

The website gave the characters somewhere to live.

Keeks designed and developed a digital experience built around the Sputtens world rather than a conventional product site, with the cast, an illustrated landscape to move through, and online activities that gave children something to do inside it.

The Sputtens website home: the cast standing across a snow landscape with a character product panel open over it

The Sputtens Gives Back page, set inside the same illustrated landscape

The Sputtens site shown on a desktop screen

A site panel headed Block the Cold, Embrace the Fun, with four illustrated steps for wearing the mittens

A wide band of the illustrated world: children sledding and characters playing across a snowy landscape

The world kept going off-screen.

Keeks created a Sputtens coloring book that carried the same characters and illustration language into printed play.

The Sputtens coloring book cover, the bear character drawn in outline

A coloring page: the giraffe character in a scarf holding a hot drink

A coloring page: the bear character ice fishing

More places for the characters to go.

A picture book and printed merchandise extended the same cast into new formats.

Each one reused the characters and illustration language already established, so nothing had to be redesigned to fit.

A child holding the Sputtens Snow Day picture book, the characters building a snowman on the cover

A bunch of balloons, each printed with a different Sputtens character

One product became a much bigger world.

Sputtens began with sock-puppet mittens. Keeks built the characters and visual world that connected the product to packaging, digital play, printed activities, and other brand applications.

The engagement was a defined project, and it ended as one. Keeks delivered the world. Sputtens took the product to market and carried it from there.