Marou’s journey to Milan
Among the most amazing breaks we got since the beginning of Marou was the email we received early this year from one of the editors of Wallpaper* Magazine the famous London based design magazine. The message was short and to the point: “It’s Wallpaper* calling, and we want your chocolate… We think Marou could go into our August ‘Handmade’ issue.”
At first we couldn’t quite figure out how a few bars taken home to London for Christmas by one of our friends could turn into such an opportunity, but we looked up all the great products selected by Wallpaper for their annual Handmade edition, learnt that all selected products were exhibited at the Palazzo Brioni during Milan’s Design Week and couldn’t quite believe our luck. It was clearly not a hoax, so we rang our favorite designers and soon we were all being whipped into a creative frenzy. In fact we went far beyond the Wallpaper’s brief to simply rebrand one of our existing bars and created a whole new Limited Edition chocolate with 80% cacao, selected from the best of our organic cocoa farmers in Tien Giang province.
To enhance the subtle flavors of light citrus fruit, banana, cinnamon, honey, with a hint of tobacco, we also decided to make a thinner bar, using the same original molds that we use for our classic line up, but filling the molds only up to 80g, so that the chocolate melts more easily in the mouth.
Based on our initial brief to transform our existing bar by incorporating Wallpaper’s recognizable asterisk logo:
Josh and ChiAn, our designers went into overdrive, coming up with an amazing new packaging that went into a cool retro-futuristic direction, highlighting the incredible skills of the small printing house that prints and embosses all our wrappers using traditional methods.
As we couldn’t make up our mind as to which color looks best, the Wallpaper Handmade limited edition bar will come in two different colors: a pale blue-green that is reminiscent of the color one sees everywhere on Saigon’s fading old streets and a light purple that evokes the color of ripe cocoa pods. Both packs will contain the same chocolate but we thought we’d give people a chance to choose which color they like best, although we do recommend buying both just to be on the safe side…
And now after all this effort, there’s only one little hurdle left: to safely bring a pack of 80 bars of our delicious chocolate from Ho Chi Minh City to Milan for the show’s opening night in 2 days… Being unable to fly to Milan ourselves (although we did receive the beautiful invitations and thought there was something rather enticing about taking our chocolate to a party held at the headquarters of James Bond’s official tailor’s and sponsored by Veuve Cliquot…), and puzzled by the Italian custom’s request to use a registered importer’s address to send the chocolate by airmail, we were very happy to give the consignment to our friend, fellow Saigon resident and well-known furniture designer John Reeves with the mission to please make it safely to the Palazzo Brioni with his precious cargo!
