Building a surreal city with digital artist Huang Heshan to bring SHEIN and Sriracha together for AAPI Month in Times Square
Hotropolis
For AAPI Month, SHEIN and Sriracha wanted to do something together that felt like an actual idea, not a sponsorship logo swap, big enough to run in Times Square.
The problem was obvious going in: a fashion platform and a hot sauce brand sit in completely different categories, chasing completely different audiences, with nothing built in to hold a partnership together.
We skipped the obvious "both are Asian-adjacent" answer and looked at how people actually use each product. Fashion and Sriracha are both a mix-and-match condiment, something you add to anything to make it yours. That's the one thing they actually share.
That became Hotropolis (麻辣都市): a surreal city where SHEIN's fashion and Asian food culture aren't two things stitched together for a campaign, they're just how the place works.
We brought in Huang Heshan, the Chinese digital artist behind the plastic-punk world Too Rich City, built from the visual language of China's urban villages, and had him build Hotropolis around SHEIN and Sriracha's own brand elements rather than bolting a logo onto his existing world.
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