Discovery
Everything about Snob Duck has a delectable weirdness to it. The ornithological inspiration, the daffily charismatic sketches on the packaging, the sprightly graphics and the fetching stamp. You cannot believe you are buying a soap. You are, but not exactly.
The fact that I purchased my two cakes of Snob Duck in a prominent Athens wine shop is indicative of its strident personality, idiosyncratic image and creative range. I was perusing wines and digestifs, then suddenly I spy soaps. Snob Duck with its thick paper pouch, displaying the bow tied domineering fowl arrests the eye. Along with my wine and grappa, the Snob Ducks came home with me.
The range of scents varies from melon to cotton and sandal wood combined. My soaps were evidently a promotional effort with a winery, as the perfumes were Syrah and Roussanne, two grape varieties.
Their comical labelling proclaimed “only the purest stuff” as ingredients: olive, castor and coconut oil, cacao and shea butter and the pomace from these two grape varieties.
The epic ducks who instigated the label pursued its founder, Vasilis Douros, whilst he went to work at the Kalavryta ski resort in the Peloponnese and then again at his family olive grove nearby. The macho ducks were mad at his intrusion, hence their waddling aggression.
Everything about Snob Duck has a delectable weirdness to it. The ornithological inspiration, the daffily charismatic sketches on the packaging, the sprightly graphics and the fetching stamp
Memory
Considering soap somewhat feeble and dull, Vasilis wanted to improve it with a modern view and aesthetics. He has no family tradition in this business and his practical validation for creating the brand was to absorb the surplus olive oil he had. This was combined with his obsession about soap making, despite his ignorance of it, attempting to merge raw materials, to research the product and discard the dregs.
Manually he concocted his oil with herbs, fresh juices and purées and plant milk, moulding a product, which would produce scented lather in the hands of others.
Manually he concocted his oil with herbs, fresh juices and purées and plant milk, moulding a product, which would produce scented lather in the hands of others
After a year of soapy alchemy, the graphic designer Marios Karystiou added his definitive zoomorphic pen strokes and the brand was incarnated imbued with the character traits of its founder self-deprecating humor and exuberant creativity.
All the soaps are handmade and all the stages of production from cutting moulds, to the stamping and packaging take place in a small endearing workshop in Tripoli, Arcadia.
Narration
The prefecture of Arcadia is in the central Peloponnese. A fertile area, it yields an abundance of products, white wine of the Moshophilero grape, as well as other varieties, cheese from dairies and vanilla scented honey. It also boasts significant archeological sites such as Tegea, the birthplace of the god Pan who, according to legend, lived in the mountains here. It also has, of course, aggressive ducks.
Vasilis Douros, in his own product text, repeatedly insists that his soaps have no mind purging, time halting and otherwise miraculous properties, that a soap is just a soap. Having invested Snob Duck with so much humor, design and care, it is really very much more than that.