A salesman from the nut trade starts again online.

Three Squirrels — in Chinese 三只松鼠, Sān Zhī Sōngshǔ — was founded on 16 February 2012 in Wuhu, a city on the Yangtze in Anhui province, by Zhang Liaoyuan. Chinese Wikipedia, citing reports by NetEase in 2017 and Sina in 2018, says he started with a team of five people, working from a residential flat in the city.

Zhang came from the nut trade. Chinese Wikipedia says he joined Anhui Zhanshi Food in 2003, started as a salesman in the Wuhu area and rose to become a vice general manager responsible for marketing, before leaving to set up his own business. On its website the company calls him by a nickname, “Squirrel Dad” (松鼠老爹), and says the business has grown from a five-person founding team into a company of about 3,000 people.

The model was online from the start. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the company received angel investment from the venture-capital firm IDG Capital in April 2012, two months after it was founded, opened its store on Alibaba’s Tmall platform on 19 June 2012 and went on to JD.com that December. Its products were nuts first, then dried fruit and a wider range of packaged snacks; the company’s website now lists nuts, dried fruit, dates, snacks, drinks and gift boxes, along with merchandise built on its characters.

Sales on Tmall were the measure of its early growth. In September 2017, Chinese Wikipedia says, the company’s cumulative sales on the platform passed a milestone that made it the first fast-moving consumer goods company to reach that mark there.

The listing took two attempts. Chinese Wikipedia says the company filed its prospectus with China’s securities regulator on 29 March 2017, and that the regulator cancelled its review of that application in December 2017. Three Squirrels Co., Ltd. then listed on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on 12 July 2019, with Zhang as its largest shareholder. ChiNext is the Shenzhen exchange’s board for growth companies, and Three Squirrels’ headquarters remain in Wuhu.

Xiaojian, Xiaomei and Xiaoku.

The brand’s identity is its cast. On its website the company introduces three squirrels — Xiaojian (小贱), Xiaomei (小美) and Xiaoku (小酷) — as characters “from Squirrel Planet” and describes them as the pets of the people who buy from it.

The second part of the identity is a way of speaking. The company says that in 2012 it introduced what it calls “master” culture: customers are addressed as 主人, zhǔrén, “master” or “owner,” and the company describes it as “our most honourable title” in its squirrel world.

The characters moved beyond the pack. According to Chinese Wikipedia, a 52-episode animated series called Three Squirrels began on Beijing Television’s children’s channel in April 2018; Chinese Wikipedia says it ranked first among animated programmes in its time slot. The company’s website also lists character merchandise and licensed collaborations as a business of their own.

In December 2021, a 2019 product poster was criticised on Chinese social media over the model’s eye make-up; the company said in a statement on 26 December that the make-up reflected her individual features and that no offence had been intended, Chinese Wikipedia records.

The company states its ambitions in a slogan of its own: that its food should be “affordable for everyone and available everywhere” (人人吃得起，处处买得到). Its website also says it aims to become the world’s leading nut company.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from China or Taiwan: Three Squirrels, Daoxiangcun, I-Mei, Kuai Kuai, Uni-President, Wei Chuan and C’estbon. Food and drink brands from China and Taiwan in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A snack or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the treat or refreshment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the city where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a web shop to shops of its own.

For its first years Three Squirrels sold almost entirely online, and it was the online shop that made the name. Chinese Wikipedia says the company opened its first physical store, an “experience store,” in Wuhu in September 2016, and had more than 30 by April 2018, most of them in smaller cities in eastern China.

The company’s website now describes three kinds of physical outlet. Its own shops are called “feeding shops” (投食店), extending the joke that customers are feeding the squirrels; franchised “squirrel mini-stores” (松鼠小店) carry the brand further; and in Wuhu the company describes a leisure complex called Squirrel Town (松鼠小镇). It still sells through its flagship stores on Tmall and JD.com and on other platforms, which its website links to.

As a listed company, Three Squirrels publishes its announcements and periodic reports through CNINFO, the disclosure platform designated for Shenzhen-listed companies, to which its own website links.

The squirrels also run through the company’s own vocabulary: its shops are “feeding shops,” its customers are “masters” and its founder is “Squirrel Dad,” and its website presents character merchandise and collaborations alongside the food.

For a design guide, Three Squirrels shows how a mascot and a tone of voice can carry a brand that began without shops. Compare Want Want, the rice-cracker maker with a boy mascot of its own, and Wahaha, another Chinese food and drink company that grew from a single city. For this guide we use squirrel brown, roasted orange and kernel cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Three Squirrels’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.