Critters + FLOWer Drop Tomorrow: A Mantis in the Tulips and a Midnight Garden Crawling With Bugs
Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST. Two Micro Wallets. Both limited.
Two floral wallets, and they share one idea: the flowers aren't the point. The things living in them are.
Critters
Red tulips on a blue sky, drawn big and bold with fat outlines, the petals airbrushed from cream to red like they've been dusted. One's open, one's still closed, one's tipped sideways. A cut stem in the corner is dripping. And perched on a bent stalk in the middle of it all, a green praying mantis, front legs folded, antennae up, looking directly at you like you interrupted something.
Open it and the palette drops to purple. Pink orchid-shaped blooms with red centers, tall purple grass, a dandelion head, a couple of seeds drifting. And a snail, small and purple, halfway up a stem on the left with nowhere in particular to be.
Mantis outside, snail inside. Predator on the cover, the slow guy in the back. Choo's design is cartoon-clean, no texture, no grain, just confident line and airbrushed color, and it's the most cheerful thing dropping this month.
FLOWer
The other garden is at night. Chrysanthemums, peonies and spider mums in gold, bronze, mauve and silver on black, drawn with the density of a Victorian botanical plate or a Japanese lacquer box. Every petal is there. Every leaf is veined.
Then you start finding the tenants. A caterpillar on a stem. A spider hanging in the middle of the flowers. Beetles on the leaves. A second caterpillar down in the corner. A venus flytrap with its jaws open near the edge. The flowers are beautiful and everything in them is either eating or waiting to.
The interior keeps the garden going: a silver peony on the left, a dark plum one in the middle, gold chrysanthemums, and more bugs, including a spider on a leaf and a caterpillar working its way along a stem near the bottom edge. It's the same night, one panel over.
In-house design, and easily the most detailed thing we've printed this season. The capital letters in the name are on purpose and you can decide what they mean.
Two Gardens, One Joke
Floral wallets are usually decoration. Pretty pattern, nothing happening. Both of these put something alive in the flowers and make you look for it. One does it in daylight with a mantis and a snail. The other does it in the dark with a spider and a flytrap. Same joke, opposite lighting.
Carry Critters on the days you feel good and FLOWer on the days you don't, or the other way round, we're not your doctor.
Format
Both are Micro Wallets. 1.3mm thin, 6 to 8 cards plus folded cash, front pocket. RFID-blocking, like everything we make apart from the coin pouch. Tyvek, waterproof at the fiber level and tear-resistant, and the print doesn't darken when wet, which for a garden is a nice trick.
Who's Copping This
Plant people. Both of them, obviously, but Critters is the one for the balcony-full-of-pots crowd and FLOWer is the one for the dark-academia bookshelf.
Bug people. The mantis and the spider are the real subjects here and you know if that's you.
Anyone who wants a floral that isn't soft. Neither of these is soft.
Halloween-week shoppers. FLOWer drops on October 30 and it's black with a spider in it. Do the math.
Drop
Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST, both in the Micro Wallet collection. Limited runs, no restock, no reprint. If florals are your lane, Lisa Goebel's Floral Tales is still in the Micro collection if any are left, and the full collection has the rest.
