BRANDIDENTITYTRANSMEDIAWORLDBUILDING
JOS
LOUIS
SAPUTO
Jos Louis is not just a snack cake. It is a 92-year-old collective memory. Every Quebecer has a childhood story that involves one. When Saputo Boulangerie approached the studio in 2009, the brief wasn't to refresh the packaging. It was to make a cultural institution feel alive again, without breaking the thing that made it sacred in the first place.
We didn't hand them a logo update. We handed them a world. A transmedia universe built on the codes of Montreal street culture, anchored by four original characters who weren't brand mascots. They were people. They had emails. They had opinions. They had feuds. They replied to fans at midnight. The community didn't know it was talking to a brand. It thought it was talking to people, because to us, it was.
The result was one of the most ambitious brand collaborations in Canadian consumer food history. A near-three-million-dollar creative mandate, sole-sourced to the studio, executed from first sketch to national broadcast, from supermarket shelf to metro station. And fifteen years later, the box still sells as a collector import on Amazon US. That's not nostalgia. That's the shelf life of a well-made decision.
Jos Louis had been on kitchen tables for three generations. The brief demanded we reach a new audience without alienating the one that already loved it. Any creative decision that felt like a rebrand would have been fatal. It had to feel like a natural evolution, not an agency intervention.
The studio's credibility is built on independence and authenticity inside street and graffiti culture. Taking that energy into a product sold at every Provigo and IGA in Canada required conviction. Sell out the culture and the whole thing collapses. Hold the line and it becomes something nobody expected.
Saputo didn't want a 30-second spot and a new box. They wanted a world. Characters, content, community, events, merchandise, social presence. All coherent, all connected, all feeding each other. That kind of scope requires a creative director who can architect a system, not just execute a brief.
Jos Louis is a Quebec icon. The new universe had to feel rooted in the city it came from, in the culture that was actually living there in 2009. Not a generic "urban" aesthetic borrowed from elsewhere. Something that only Montreal, and only Klor and Scien, could have made.
PACKAGING REDESIGN
CHARACTERS — JAY · MAY · BAM BAM · ONCLE LOUIS
18 SHORT FILMS — 5 VISUAL UNIVERSES
WHAT UP GANGSTARS — COMMUNITY PLATFORM
OOH — MÉTRO · BUS · BILLBOARD · BRANDED VEHICLE
The campaign extended to the street in the most literal sense. A VW Touareg fully wrapped in the W.U.G. visual system was deployed across Montréal as a mobile brand activation unit. Not a truck, not a fleet — a single vehicle, impossible to miss, impossible to ignore. Every kilometer it covered was earned media. The brand moved through the city the same way the culture it was referencing always had: on foot, in the streets, without asking permission.
MERCH · COLLECTIBLES · GOODIES
Full Jos Louis box redesign with signature lettering, mascot character, and new color system. Nationwide retail distribution across Canada.
Jay, May, Bam Bam, Oncle Louis. Full backstories, detailed illustration, physical hand puppets, dedicated email addresses, individual social accounts.
what-up-gangstars.com. Full blog, lifestyle content, character-hosted web series. Characters wrote in their own voices, daily, for years.
Original web series with bespoke animated generics across 5 visual universes, plus national TV broadcast spots.
Four fictional personas living as real people across 7 platforms simultaneously. The community engaged with them as humans. That was the strategy.
Seasonal sticker packs distributed inside Jos Louis boxes. Collector mechanic driving repeat purchase and brand loyalty across seasons.
Metro posters (139"×30"), bus shelter ads, billboards across Montréal. VW Touareg fully wrapped as a mobile brand activation unit.
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Dailymotion. Each character with their own account, voice, and community relationships.
Soirée de lancement, December 2009. Live puppet performances, merchandise drops, plasma screen content, full brand activation.
New packaging on shelves nationwide. The box as the first entry point into the world, with a character on the back panel that made you want to find out more.
National TV spots carrying the W.U.G. characters to mainstream audiences. The same creative system, the same voice, scaled to prime time.
Metro, bus shelter, and billboard advertising saturating Montréal. A branded VW Touareg making the universe move through the city.
Platform, blogs, 18 films, and 7 social platforms where four fictional characters lived real lives and built real relationships with a real audience.
The Jos Louis x 123K packaging has achieved rare collector status. In 2026, the original boxes continue to be imported and resold on Amazon US at a significant premium. That's not nostalgia. That's the shelf life of a well-made creative decision. Design that earns cultural value doesn't expire. It compounds.
A 92-year-old icon, reborn as a street culture phenomenon. Still relevant 15 years later.
Full-scope sole-source mandate over 3 years. Packaging, video, TV, OOH, web, events, social, and community management. All conceived and delivered by Klor and Scien.
Social platforms activated with character-specific accounts in 2009. Four fictional personas living as real people, interacting with each other and with fans daily. A pioneering model of narrative community management, before anyone had a name for it.
Cultural longevity. The packaging continues to circulate as a collector artifact on Amazon US in 2026. Proof that creative conviction, applied at the right scale, produces cultural value that outlasts the campaign by a decade and a half.
