Field notes
Kuching has been dressing a cat for thirty-eight years. In July it wore a Pepsi can.
LOOK AT THE PAW.
On 1 August 1988, the day Kuching became a city, a white cat went up on the Padungan roundabout with its left paw raised. Thirty-eight years later it is still waving at traffic.
It is also still getting dressed, and the wardrobe is the point.
What the Padungan cat has worn, and when.
When the council repainted those eyes to soften them, that was news. This is a city that argues in public about how its cat looks.
Kuching's municipal coat of arms carries a cat. Heraldry has a word for this. Canting arms are arms that pun on the bearer's name, and since Kuching means cat, the council put one on its shield alongside the scales of justice and a rafflesia.
The council itself was formed on 1 August 1988, the same day the statue went up, the same day the city got its name in law.
So when a global brand puts a cat on a can in Kuching, it is not borrowing a mascot. It is joining a register the city has been writing since before most of its residents were born.
This July, Pepsi Malaysia returned for a second consecutive year as Official Main Sponsor of the Kuching Festival Fair and released the first limited edition can in the festival's forty year history. Borneo Tales works on Pepsi's presence at the festival, and on the design that carries it.
A global brand arriving somewhere specific has two options. Explain itself to the place, or show it already understands the place. The first produces a logo in a local colourway. The second requires knowing what the city already knows about itself.
Kuching hands you half the answer for free, because the name means cat. But a cat is the obvious version. A cat that waves is the useful one, because the wave is the part locals recognise without being told, and the part that needs no caption when the can travels beyond Sarawak.
Nobody was briefed to photograph the can. People photographed it because it is a cat, in Cat City, on a drink you are already holding at a food stall. A design that strangers pick up and point a phone at has done something a media buy cannot.
Flat fills, heavy outline, high contrast against Pepsi blue, no gradients on the character. That is not taste. It is what survives curved aluminium, small print, a food stall at eight in the evening, and a phone held by someone who has been queuing twenty minutes.
And it is a system, not a decoration. It scales from thumb-sized on the can to full height on a launch backdrop, holds two colourways across print and screen, and runs through the campaign line, the roller banners, the table collateral and the hashtag.
A DRAWING THAT ONLY WORKS AT ONE SIZE IS AN ILLUSTRATION. ONE THAT WORKS AT EVERY SIZE IS AN ASSET.
This is not Pepsi's only Borneo work this year. The brand ran PEPSI FM across four Borneo radio stations for Gawai and Kaamatan, released harvest cans using Dayak and Murut motifs co-created with East Malaysian artists, and activated at Kampung Ta'ee on 1 June. The Kuching Festival Fair can is the fourth beat in a single year.
That is a brand doing the harder version of localisation, and the harder version needs people who are from here. Borneo Tales is a Sarawak company, working on Borneo brands, in the places those brands actually land. The Padungan cat is not research to us. It is on the way to the office.
In the studio, we call him Padu.