Back in 2016, Line Friends, a cartoon emoji brand from the local instant messaging app Line, launched an extremely popular co-branded series with Vans Korea under the leadership of Vans Korea. Today we’re going to talk about a three-way collaboration between Kakao Friends, another south Korean messaging app brand, and Hyunye, a south Korean artist.
Kakao Friends, also an original cartoon emoji built into Kakao’s chat app, is made up of eight different characters: Ryan the lion, Muzi the pickled radish, dressed as a rabbit; Con, which looks like a carp; Apeach, which is really Apeach; Neo & Frodo, a dog and cat couple; duck Tube, which can change its shape; and jay-g, a secret police officer.
In the joint name of Kakao Friends x Hyunye x Vans this time, the artist used Kakao Friends’ character image and gave full play to his unimaginative imagination to redesign it and created many joint shoe styles including Slip-On, Era, Old Skool and Sk8-Hi, which were composed of orange, purple, blue and other colorful colors.
The Era is covered in orange, covered with Hyunye’s hand-painted Kakao Friends designs, and the image of Apeach is hidden on the tongue. The sk8-hi is made of purple canvas and suede with a Hyunye re-created Kakao Friends family photo printed on the side. Old Skool appeared in the mirror in sky blue with little flowers turned by Ryan on the side. It was also not hard to find its figure on the tongue of the shoe. Finally, the Slip-On was printed with blue and white hand – painted checkerboard pattern before and after, and the various positions of Con skateboard were printed On the heel and the edge of the outsole bag. Joint will also have children’s shoes for sale.
In order to design The joint name of The three parties, Hyunye said that he “imagined a world in which Kakao Friends were all” Off The Wall”. Each hand-painted Kakao Friends had a” hidden personality “under Hyunye’s hand-painted picture, so as to get rid of The pressure and mainstream style and present The distinctive style of expression that Hyunye wanted.
The Kakao Friends x Hyunye x Vans collaboration will be available for sale at the designated Vans store as well as on Kakao Friends’ website starting May 3. 
