By Adam Williams (That's Shanghai)
Updated: 2007-04-23 10:55

Take a trip around some of the city's most happening boutique streets, Changle Lu and Xinle Lu, for example, and you'll spot plenty of freshly-painted shop fronts featuring interesting clothing by local designers. But few display the wonderful quirkiness of recently-opened Perk.

Founding designers Wowo and Zao met online a few years ago at popular design forum www.poobbs.com. Wowo was at Shanghai University, studying product design and packaging, while Zao was up north, majoring in fashion design at Tianjin's Art Academy. "We found it easy to start collaborating," Wowo explains, "because both our programs were teaching us to integrate new media into being creative. We could exchange drawings quickly over email, and even without meeting in person, we realized we shared a vision."

That vision first received exposure in 2005 at the Get It Louder exhibition. Later, the Perk duo briefly collaborated with stalwart Shanghai designers Shirt Flag before unveiling their own shop in 2006.

As the two explored their common ground in drawings, they applied their training to create a niche brand, though one with fairly broad appeal. "Many of my designs come from dreams and the little doodles I do when I'm thinking about something else," says Wowo, showing off two of the toy characters that feature in this season's line of stationery and wrapping paper. One character is a bear, sporting a jaunty hat and a devious grin, perhaps because it is holding a naked doll in its paws. "Oh, he's not going to eat her," Wowo says with a somewhat sheepish grin. "They're just playing together."

Be that as it may, stylish packaging sensibilities run throughout Perk's paper collection, which ranges from heavily-patterned paper bags with cinch tops, to small journals with clever pockets and interlocking layers of durable oaktag, each with bright pink and turquoise pages. And it's easy to fall in love with the weird, cute characters that adorn them, each with a uniquely offbeat expression that makes you want to apply for, well, adoption papers.

Overall, Perk's designs are both silly and evocative. There's a bit of the dreamer in Wowo, a willowy man with thick glasses and a quiet manner, who's clearly delighted to have a space of his own. "Sure, we dreamed of opening a shop in Shanghai that could give our brand an identity, but we also thought it would be great to make it a funhouse too," he says, pointing out a plastic light fixture in the shape of a lamb and arranging a few of the soup can-size tin robots (from a fellow designer's shop) so they may indulge more easily in conversation.

If this sounds like a trip to Babes in Toyland, it is just that. The shop offers a child-like journey into the imagination of its owners. A journey that starts at the door, painted in a glossy, candy apple red and topped with a white awning speckled with lightning bolts. Indeed, the shop invites passerbys to peek through the window, where they'll spy a disorderly riot of colors and textiles.

Inside, the curious will find themselves standing on a plastic floor with the brightest patterned tiles this side of a cartoon. The walls are lined with neatly-tacked Polaroids of Perk's products, posing on rooftops and park benches around Shanghai. "We wanted them [the products] to seem like they're on vacation here, having their photos taken for posterity," says Wowo.

For those with slightly more grown-up tastes, Zao's clothing lines are on display too, with the current season offering subtly clever sweatshirt jersey jackets alongside last year's crop of offbeat plaids and corduroys. Zao has the cherrypicker’s eye for vivid prints and odd accessories. Take the demure girl's seersucker shirt with a bright pattern of tiny robots, for instance, or a patterned corduroy shirt with frog-green felt pockets and little teddy bear heads for buttons. There's also a rack of shirts that mix polka-dotted arms with plaid bodies, matched with bright, chunky knit scarves. It must be said that none of the clothes match each other, and some of their patterns are almost anarchic. But they're certifiably unique. For accessories, you can choose a Perk bag, perhaps one made of polka-dotted white vinyl with paint spattered across it, or another made of sweatshirt terry cotton with loose, looping straps and a cinch top.

For all their technical know-how, Perk's designs possess an innocent, slightly awkward bent. Zao and Wowo are still finding their voices, as well as the direction of their new brand. But standing together outside their shop, they appear to be symbols of Shanghai's nascent generation of Chinese designers, eager to look inward and
reach outward.

Perk
Location: 271 Fuxing Xi Lu, by Gaoyou Lu
Tel: 021-5465 2879