In 2016 before they became Onikuma Gaming, a 5-man team at an early stage e commerce startup began selling gaming headsets on Amazon. Things were going well, but the team had no brand nor any way to truly stand out from their competitors.
This team tasked Somos with building a unique brand to set themselves apart from the competition in the increasingly crowded gaming peripherals space. This is the story of how Onikuma Gaming was born.
Somos built this entire brand from scratch, starting from the brand name - Onikuma Gaming. The story and magic behind the brand includes logo design, graphic design, a unique character IP, Visual Identity (VI) guidebook, product & lifestyle photography, and a custom coded Shopify website.
By 2019, this 5-man startup grew to over 50 employees and surpassed $42 million USD in annual sales. Somos has grown with Onikuma over the years, and we’re thrilled to share our story.
We set out to give Onikuma Gaming nearly everything they needed to launch their brand, and succeeded in this challenge.
Certain aspects, such as the graphic design and VI guidebook took significantly longer than others, but we’ve put things here in chronological order to showcase how we gave birth to this demon baby. The entirety of the project took 3.5 - 4 months to complete with all rounds of feedback and revisions.
It’s been fun watching Onikuma Gaming grow from their humble origins, and rewarding to see how far they’ve come since the early days. We’re really excited to see what they do next!
Originating from the stylescapes we introduced early in our branding process, both teams knew that we were going to be drawing inspiration from Japanese culture. Of the concept ideas we gathered, both teams were especially drawn to traditional Japanese masks. Of the masks we reviewed, the one that stood out the most was the Oni (Demon) mask.
Knowing that this is the direction we would be taking, we built upon the Japanese demon concept to create the unique icon that is Onikuma – a bear demon. Staying true to the brand’s industry, we finally settled on the name of Onikuma Gaming.
The Somos team created 4 logo concepts inspired by the Oni mask. After deciding that some of our other concepts might be a tad too “edgy," we settled our initial concept. After some slight revisions, we arrived at our final logo.
As we were creating a demon-inspired brand - red, white and black were natural color choices which reflect Onikuma’s bold presence.
With our logo, colors and fonts decided, we moved on to create a unique IP character for the brand. We drew upon a range of gaming references for inspiration at this stage. After playing around with a lot of concept ideas, we narrowed it down to 2 choices for the character. Ultimately we settled on the “Engineer Onikuma” character. We created a main pose and 3 additional poses - 1 for each product line. With our character ready, we created some key visuals to showcase Onikuma in his natural habitat, for use on the upcoming website and brand materials.
We assembled everything we made for the brand with clear usage guidelines in this Visual Identity guidebook. While meeting to run through our newly created brand VI guidebook, we started discussing the powers of the demon with the Onikuma team. The topic of possession came up, and we noticed that a lot of gamers (including ourselves) can spend hours in front of a screen without flinching, as if possessed by some mysterious force. Could this be the Onikuma demon at work? From this idea came the brand’s slogan: “Game Like One Possessed.” We started contemplating the origins of the Onikuma demon and realized that he must have been accompanying the brand’s founder, Liu Ming throughout his life. We built on Liu’s personal story of growing up in a small village in rural China to document the fateful day he encountered the Onikuma, heard its mysterious song, and had his whole life transformed.
At this stage, we had created the brand guidelines and an initial batch of intriguing visual content for Onikuama. All that was left to do is implement it on their new website and social channels!
With the brand guidebook finished, it was time to start prepping the remaining photo assets we would need for the website, as the brand’s existing white background Amazon photos would not produce the desired visual effect. We chose several products to create hero shots for and handled all shooting and post production.
Now it was time to take everything we had made and bring it to life in the brand’s custom coded Shopify website. The sheer amount of content we had made greatly accelerated this process.
We set out to give Onikuma Gaming everything they needed to launch their brand, and succeeded in this challenge. This was a huge amount of work; the entirety of the project took 3.5 - 4 months to complete with all rounds of feedback and revisions. Certain aspects, such as the graphic design and VI guidebook took significantly longer than others, but we’ve put things here in chronological order to showcase how we gave birth to this demon baby. It’s been fun watching Onikuma Gaming grow from their humble origins, and really rewarding to see how far they’ve come since the early days. We’re really excited to see what they do next!
