Anniversary
Product Design
- Research
- Collection design
- Art direction
- Employer brand
Anniversary 2026
The gift SoftServe people get on their work anniversary — reimagined from "company merch" into a cohesive collection people choose, wear, and show off.
See more↓Less like a box of company merch, more like a collection you'd want anyway.
Every year, people at SoftServe get a gift on their work anniversary — and they get to choose what they actually want. My job was to make that choice feel less like picking from a box of company merch, and more like shopping a collection you'd want anyway.
This is the 2026 collection — the second anniversary collection I shaped, each year with its own approach. A lineup designed to hold together as one, not a pile of logo-stamped items.
How do you make corporate anniversary merch that people genuinely want to wear — without it shouting whose merch it is?
The brand wants to be recognized; people want things that look good on them. Lean too far to the brand and it becomes a logo nobody wears. Lean too far to style and it stops being the company's at all.
Hold both — and make six separate items read as one collection.
The best branded things don't announce the brand.
Before diving in, I researched how other brands build merch people actually keep — what makes a collection desirable and universal. One thing kept returning: they look stylish and well-made first; the logo is quiet. People wear them because they're good — not because they have to.
That reframed the whole brief. The goal wasn't louder branding — it was restraint: quality, a consistent style, and a palette borrowed from the anniversary program's visual language tying everything together.
Every piece has to sit next to the others and still look right — that coherence is what turns items into something people treat as real.
I owned the concept and design of the collection, end to end — the thinking that made six items feel like one.
Uliana handled vendor communication and delivery, sourced the first sample variants, and selected candidate items — which we worked through together. Her side kept it real, producible, and delivered; mine kept it coherent. The synergy is what made it a collection.
Six kits, one collection
Each kit has its own theme — everyday, outdoors, sustainability, downtime, workspace, culture — but all are built to one standard: minimalist, consistent in style, suited to a wide age range, and designed so every object complements the next.
The anniversary program's colors run through all of them, so across different items and themes it still reads as a single collection.
Not six gifts.
One collection,
six ways in.
The real test of merch isn't the mockup — it's whether people wear it.
A dedicated photoshoot put the collection on real people, and that's exactly where it proves itself: on bodies, in daylight, worn like clothes rather than displayed like swag.
People wear it — and show it.
The collection turns up in employees' own social posts, worn and shown off rather than tucked in a drawer.
“SoftServe dresses its people in things good enough to actually want.”
Worn and shown off in employees' own posts — not tucked in a drawer.
Genuine reactions, not a metricAnniversary started as a question about merch and ended as a lesson I keep relearning: good design is strategy. The shift wasn't in making nicer items — it was in deciding they had to behave as one collection.
We didn't make merch.
We made a collection.