Christmas is approaching, and it brings back memories of a small but meaningful key visual project we once worked on with Ginkgo Concept.
Ginkgo Concept is well known as a souvenir and fashion brand for travelers visiting Saigon. Its products and visual language celebrate everyday local culture—things that feel familiar, lived-in, and distinctly Vietnamese. Because of that, the Christmas imagery we created needed to reflect the same spirit, rather than borrowing festive visuals wholesale from the West.
There’s a scene you’ll often spot around Christmas in Saigon—or any major Vietnamese city: Santa Claus riding a motorbike through the streets. As a humorous detail, many of these “Santas” are noticeably… skinny. That image became the spark for our concept: a very Vietnamese series of Santas titled “Ginkgo All the Way”—a playful twist on Jingle All the Way.
The visuals place Santa into unmistakably everyday moments: sitting on a plastic stool playing chess, decorating streetlight poles with Christmas lights, or speeding through the city on a motorbike. Familiar, slightly absurd, and deeply local.
To us, this project became an interesting visual collision between Western iconography and local culture. Creativity doesn’t always need to follow established templates—it can be more democratic, more street-level. In that sense, culture isn’t only about heritage or tradition; it’s also about how life unfolds day by day. And sometimes, that’s best told through the lens of contemporary, ordinary moments.
