Funny animation starring St.Nicholas for Amsterdam toyshop

What you can do with good branding and design for your business? Create a funny animation starring St. Nicholas for a Amsterdam toyshop.

It’s Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) time again in The Netherlands, which means people are buying presents and writing poems for their children and each other.

This is the best time for my client Knutsel Frutsel, toyshop in Amsterdam, and we came up with an idea to attract attention to this time of Sinterklaas and the tradition of making “surprises”.

A typical Dutch Sinterklaas tradition is creating “surprises” (pronounced in the French way) where families, friends or children at school come together to give a present to one of the group. Lots bearing the names of the participants are drawn some time beforehand and an agreement is made about how much will be spent on the presents. They select a name written on a piece of paper and have to buy a small gift for that person, without the other knowing.

The idea is to wrap the present in a very creative way, difficult to find or open up and best is if you create or build an object that says something about you gift receiver (I once created a cardboard piano for my aunt and a huge cardboard castle for my little sister with little clues where to find the present… I know… creativity is in my bones 😉).

So for this occasion I have made an animation based on the Knutsel Frutsel branding reminding their customer where to go for help, presents and crafting ingredients so essential to “surprise”-making.

The Knutsel Frutsel St. Nicholas Poem (Sinterklaas gedicht).

Because the girls at Knutsel Frutsel also wrote a Sinterklaas poem (in Dutch) about the headache of thinking of and making “surprises” and where to source your stuff, I visualised this poem with illustrations for use on social media.