When I was working with Solstice we kept circling the same problem: how do you get people to care about a yield product they can’t see or touch? My answer came out of a sketchbook rather than a spreadsheet. A small family of collectible figures with a story underneath them, something you could pick up, put on a shelf and share with the community.
Why now
In the space of a few weeks last month, two of the biggest companies in tech decided their AI needed a face. Meta gave its Muse agent a fuzzy, rosy-cheeked creature called Jolly, and OpenAI followed with Dots, a set of Muppet-ish characters in berets and bow ties. Both are there to make an agent that reads your email and spends your money feel like a friendly little helper rather than something you should be wary of.
I found it quite validating, if I’m honest, because it’s exactly the problem I was trying to solve for Solstice. When a product is abstract, a bit intimidating and asks for your trust before you understand it, a character gives people something to hold on to. AI and crypto share that problem almost perfectly.
Where I’d part company with Meta and OpenAI is in what the face is for. A lot of the coverage has been sceptical, and fairly so, because a cute mascot can paper over real risk. Ed Zitron called it “entirely marketing”. I wanted the Solstice characters to do the opposite and wear the risk openly, which is why both of them have X’s for eyes. More on that further down.
Why characters work
Brands have been doing this for well over a century. Michelin’s Bibendum turned up in 1898 as a stack of tyres with a cigar, and he’s still selling tyres today, mostly because a character can carry a feeling across generations in a way a logo rarely manages. People forgive a character things they’d never forgive a company, and they’ll talk about one as if it were a friend.
The modern masterclass is Duolingo. In February 2025 they killed off Duo, their slightly menacing green owl, with a Cybertruck, held a funeral and told users the only way to bring him back was to do their lessons. Fans racked up more than 50 billion XP in about two weeks to resurrect a cartoon bird. That’s a community doing the brand’s marketing for it, and enjoying every minute.
The example closest to Solstice is Pudgy Penguins, which started life as an NFT collection and is now on toy shelves in thousands of Walmart stores. They sold over 750,000 toys in their first year, around $10 million worth, and each one came with a QR code linking it back to the digital world. It proved something a lot of people in crypto doubted, which is that a web3 brand can build real affection in the physical world, with people who have never owned a token.
Then there’s the art toy scene itself, which I’ll come back to, because KAWS solved the hardest part of my brief years before I had it.
The brief I set myself
You can’t put yield on a shelf. Solstice’s product is clever and properly complex, and complex things are hard to love, so I wanted something physical that could work in two very different rooms at once.
A degen should want it on his shelf next to his monitors, and a partner CEO or someone at an institution should be happy to have the same thing on his desk. I didn’t want a softened version that tried to please both and ended up pleasing nobody. It had to be one object that felt at home in a bedroom full of screens and in a glass-walled office with a view.
The idea
The name gave me the answer. A solstice only happens because the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees, and without that tilt there’d be no seasons at all, just the same grey weather all year round. So the tilt is the rule that makes everything else possible. It gives you the cycles, and the cycles give you the bull and the bear.
That changed how I saw the whole thing. I’d started out picturing two mascots squaring up to each other, and ended up with one law that has two faces. Zenith is the top of the cycle, summer and the bull market rolled into one, while Nadir lives down at the bottom with the winter and the bear. They look like opposites but they come from exactly the same place.
The rule itself needed a face too, and that became 23.5, a small, silent, spherical figure that carries both colour worlds at once. It’s the smallest thing on the shelf and the reason the other two exist, and I liked the idea that the real boss is the one nobody notices.
Research
Before drawing anything I wanted to understand why objects like this work at all. The vinyl art toy had already crossed the divide I was worried about. A KAWS Companion looks just as right in a skater’s bedroom as it does in a hedge fund office, and it’s been doing that for more than twenty years, so I wasn’t inventing a trick so much as borrowing one that’s well proven.
The figures also had to speak crypto without trying too hard, and the eyes are where that shows most. In crypto, X eyes mean you got rekt and liquidated. Putting dead eyes on the characters is the joke, because everyone in the space knows the crash is always one bad day away and they buy anyway. This is the bit I find most interesting next to Jolly and Dots. Their faces are designed to reassure you, whereas these ones admit the risk out loud and trust the audience to find that funny.
The medallion and the suited-up feel give it a street edge tipping into cliché, and the 23.5 degree tilt underneath means the cycles read as something inevitable to live with rather than a problem to fix.
The characters
Sketches came first, in pencil on paper, working out the silhouette and the read before any pixels existed. The notes on the Zenith page are all still there: eyes glowing behind the sunnies, sun rays forming the hood, space patches, a Solstice medallion and Adidas shell-toes on his feet.
Zenith is the accelerator, the smart degen who knows the streets as well as he knows the spreadsheets. He’ll do the maths properly and then send it anyway. Left to his own devices he’d buy anything, and he has never once in his life said let’s wait.
Nadir works the brake. He’s stoic and patient, the master of deep code and security, and he keeps his hood up because he does his best work in the dark with his head down, auditing the layers most people never look at. His flaw mirrors Zenith’s, since he’s so careful he’d never ship anything.
23.5 keeps the pair of them honest, but it never speaks.
You may ask which one is the hero, and the answer is neither of them. All accelerator and you crash, all brake and you never get anywhere, and you need the constant underneath for any of it to mean something.
From sketch to form
The faceted, low-poly style does two jobs. It reads as something built from the network, and it keeps the figures clean and deliberate where a softer style would have drifted towards generic. Once the pencil work had settled the silhouette and the personality, vector studies tightened the shapes and locked in the colour worlds, warm for Zenith and cool for Nadir, with 23.5 sitting in the middle.
From there I used AI tools to iterate quickly on the rendered look, and I want to be straight about how. Claude helped me develop the style prompts, and Nano Banana let me test the figures in something close to a 3D render far faster than I could have otherwise. I steered both the whole way. The 23.5 idea, what the X eyes mean, the flaws and the two-rooms brief all came from judgement rather than generation, and the tools rendered what I’d decided.
The versions I threw away matter as much as the ones I kept, because that’s where the taste actually lives.
Building a community around them
What makes this an asset rather than merch is that it keeps working long after the drop. Solstice is a finance business, but people stay with a brand for the culture as much as the returns, and the characters give them a reason to stick around and talk about it.
The simplest version is a question. “Are you feeling Zenith or Nadir today?” lets people say how they’re feeling about the market, greedy and up for it or patient and battening down, without needing to explain yield curves to anyone. It’s the kind of shorthand a community picks up and runs with on its own.
The physical figures do something different. Giving one away as a reward, in the app or at an event, makes the person receiving it feel singled out, and on a conference stand a proper collectible pulls a crowd in a way a branded pen never will. Each figure can also ship with a matching digital twin, the same move Pudgy Penguins made with their QR codes, which gives the object provenance and ties the shelf back to the chain.
Where it goes
The plan I put forward was a small, numbered first run of 235 units, so even the edition size nods to the tilt. Resin for the first edition keeps tooling costs down and the risk small, with vinyl as the next step if it lands.
For the brand it’s owned IP rather than a one-off spend. The whole thing costs less than a single conference sponsorship and it doesn’t expire when the stand gets packed away, because the characters can keep working across social, events, rewards and the digital twins for as long as the brand is around. And there’s something about handing a partner-firm CEO a Nadir across the table that tells them you have taste and a long view before anyone has opened a deck.
Watching Meta and OpenAI reach for characters this autumn, I think the lesson for smaller brands is that you don’t need their budget to do it, just a reason for the character to exist and the nerve to let it be a bit honest.
Ian Howarth
September, 23, 2026
What a marketing design system is, and why yours now needs to work with AI.
