My WIA 2026 Shortlisted Project - Swiss Army Knives
Behind the Scenes

This project has
been shortlisted
for the World Illustration
Awards 2026!

This project is quite unique in the the way it came about. I work with Jumi Cheese, the commissioner, on a regular basis and found out that they were in talks with Victorinox to create a Jumi Cheese Swiss Army Knife.
I immediately let them know that I would love to work on this project and went straight into creating a pitch deck.

Here you can see the coloured rough sketches I included in my pitch. I had not yet been commissioned at this point.

This pitch was of course preceeded by lots of sketches:
My sketching almost always happens in ink and not pencil. I don’t like to erase things and love the happy accidents & wonky lines which come out of imperfect ink drawings. So rather than refining and adjusting one sketch, I often draw things over and over again until I’m happy with it.

The most challenging part of the sketch phase was to find a way to capture my client ‘Jumi Cheese’ in just one small product.
Jumi Cheese is a Swiss artisanal cheese company, based in Boll near the Bernese Alps. The family business is known for making Swiss artisan cheese made with raw milk follwoing traditional methods.Additionally, the knives are meant for sale in Jumi’s London stores, so communicating Jumi’s Swiss heritage was even more crucial.

To appeal to London audiences I wanted to achieve two things:
A design which tells the customer Jumi’s story while also looking attractive as a stand alone design item. A pocket knife which looks good on your keychain, matches your outfit, without an overly cheese-heavy design.

My pitch drew strong interest and I officially joined the project.
The work from here on was very collaborative: We decided to create two knives in two different sizes, one small, one regular sized.

I created more refined colour drafts to reflect all our design intentions:

I picked colourways which harmonise with one another so the knives can work as a series
The front of the knives show Jumi’s heritage through visual cues: A Swiss Alpine landscape with subtle hints of Alpine farmers and cheesemaking
The back of the knives more explicitly push the cheese in focus while maintaining strong Jumi branding

The finalising and vectorising of the design was an important step for me as I wanted to ensure the hand drawn quality of the illustrations will be visible on the final product.

Together with Victorinox we discussed using different colours for the knife plastic casing - even a transparent pink version.

In the end however, we settled on using the blue and green multicolour design while printing on a white opaque base to achieve the best colour result.

For promotion and credit, I created tiny sticker labels for each knife box, leading customers to my website and instagram.

Thank you for follwoing along! To see the final outcome please visit the Swiss Army Knive project page in my portfolio:

See the final project!