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What does it take to turn a festive moment into a cultural asset?

For Coca-Cola, Lunar New Year is one of the most commercially significant occasions across Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam. It is also one of the most symbolically rich. Red signals prosperity. Auspicious icons carry wishes for luck, reunion, and renewal. To win here, Coca-Cola could not simply look festive. It needed to build something distinctive, scalable, and culturally resonant enough to endure beyond a single year.

The challenge was cultural nuance at scale. Vietnam celebrates Tết with its own emotional codes rooted in homecoming and family reunion. Singapore and Malaysia reflect layered multicultural contexts, where Chinese traditions intersect with Southeast Asian heritage. The design had to feel locally authentic while remaining regionally cohesive. It needed to unify Tết and Lunar New Year under one creative language without flattening the richness of either.
Our ambition was to create more than a seasonal pack. We set out to establish an ownable festive platform for Coca-Cola, one that could flex across markets, extend year after year, and live beyond the can as a recognisable brand asset.

We found our answer in fireworks.

Fireworks are a universal signal of celebration, renewal, and shared joy. They mark new beginnings across cultures. More importantly, they mirror the effervescence at the heart of Coca-Cola itself. We saw the opportunity to elevate fireworks from decorative background into Coca-Cola’s ownable Lunar New Year icon.

Rather than depicting fireworks literally, we reimagined them through the lens of Asian craftsmanship. Inspired by Vietnamese brocade, Chinese silk embroidery, and Peranakan beadwork, each burst became a richly detailed composition of stitched symbols and ornamental pattern. The language translates thread, bead, and textile into intricate illustration, giving the packs a tactile, crafted sensibility that feels both celebratory and elevated.

In Vietnam, golden swallows, peach blossoms, and red envelopes are woven into brocade inspired fireworks, honouring reunion and familial return. In Singapore and Malaysia, spirit horses, florals, ingots, bamboo, and ornamental fans emerge within bead like bursts, symbolising prosperity, resilience, and longevity. Each market retains its own cultural storytelling, yet the fireworks structure unifies them into one unmistakable system.

From afar, the packs are bold and instantly recognisable as Coca-Cola. Up close, they reveal layers of meaning and detail, inviting discovery and emotional connection. The fireworks device becomes both a graphic anchor and a storytelling canvas. The system was built to scale seamlessly across cans, multipacks, gift cartons, retail displays, and digital touchpoints. The fireworks expand, crop, and adapt across formats without losing integrity. The intricate detailing lends itself naturally to collectible editions and retail theatre, transforming packaging into a keepsake that consumers anticipate and treasure.

By anchoring the design in a shared celebratory symbol and expressing it through distinctive local craft traditions, we created a cohesive festive identity that feels universal yet deeply rooted in culture. In doing so, Coca-Cola’s Lunar New Year packaging moves beyond seasonal decoration to become a cultural asset, building long term ownability, relevance, and moments of uplifting togetherness year after year.