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The Brand Identity: The mascot at the centre of Metis – VitaDairy’s pre-teen milk brand in Vietnam – was first shaped through AI in the early stages of Vietnam-based studio M — N Associates’ design process, then refined by hand into something its target audience could feel attached to. Gen Alpha is the first audience growing up with AI as part of daily life, so the studio wanted the method of creating Vitrô to reflect that. “At the beginning, the AI outputs were quite rough, but what interested us was the unpredictability,” Duy Nguyen, Co-Founder & Partner at M — N Associates, tells us.

“Some of the awkward proportions, expressions and compositions felt strangely aligned with Gen Alpha culture.” The studio kept the strangeness and worked back into it manually. How many curls should sit on Vitrô’s head? Should the character have a mouth? Where to place the eyes? How long should the limbs be?

None of these calibrations could be reliably held by a prompt, so the team adjusted them by hand until Vitrô felt carefree and slightly absurd. “Characters like Fido Dido for 7UP, figures that feel simple, loose and emotionally open rather than overly descriptive or narrative-driven,” Co-Founder & Partner Lan Mai explains, became the reference point for how Vitrô behaves. Emotional flexibility was the design goal. Vitrô plays loosely on the Vietnamese phrase ‘vô tri,’ which translates approximately to ‘meaningless.’ “Vitrô became intentionally blank.

That simplicity allows people to project their own emotions and humour onto the character much more naturally,” Lan Mai adds. A cloudy-headed silhouette, white and minimal, sits in strong contrast to the soft pastels and nutritional hierarchy that define most of the dairy category in Vietnam, where the visual conventions still skew toward parents. VitaDairy was already commercially successful in formula and powdered milk and was looking to enter coloured milk for a younger audience, so there was openness to a different approach. However, the conversation through development was not frictionless.

“There were definitely moments where the direction felt almost too minimal or too playful, and we had to carefully rebalance shelf visibility, nutrition hierarchy and commercial readability,” Duy Nguyen shares. The studio argued that the brand needed to feel emotionally magnetic and that a character with no fixed narrative would carry further with a generation raised on memes, stickers, games and short-form content. Once VitaDairy could see that the system communicates trust while feeling contemporary, the direction was held. The Metis logo carries the Vitrô’s character into the wordmark.

Its extended-leg ‘M’ echoes a running stride, introducing a quiet forward motion that feels like growth. Around the wordmark, the broader typographic system was built specifically for Vitrô’s world. MN Metis Sans is a custom handwritten-style sans serif drawn with soft, chunky shapes, minimal contrast and rounded terminals. It comes in three weights with full Vietnamese diacritic support, and its .notdef glyph – the placeholder that appears when a character fails to render – has been replaced with Vitrô’s head, drawn in the typeface’s proportions. The studio was aware of how the typeface would be read.

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The article discusses a significant rebranding effort for a new product targeting a specific demographic, showcasing innovative design strategies that are highly relevant to brand strategy professionals.