Over the past 10 years, Japanese teenage girls have fueled a zany fad of exchanging hand-made Valentine’s Day chocolates. Gathering ingredients and tools and practicing for weeks in advance, they stay up all night making chocolates, as many as 100 each! We conveyed this over-the-top teen fad for confirming friendship with this poster image, created with more than 1,000 cooking tools.

We assembled a variety of cooking tools and wrapping goods (more than 1000 items!) used to create handmade chocolates with the aim of creating a poster that would serve as a symbolic reference to this over-the-top teenage fad.

Using this vast number of tools to convey a girl in existential distress, we aimed to show not only the cuteness, but also the manic over-the-top zaniness of Japanese girls. The tools became symbols of the girls’ impassioned souls.

The “Ghana Valentine Hand-made Station” chocolate-making workshop publicized by the poster was a popular success, and received extensive media coverage. Ghana milk chocolate retained the No. 1 share of Valentine’s Day season bar chocolate sales for the fourth year in a row, contributing to the widespread belief that “If it’s Valentine’s Day it’s gotta be Ghana Milk Chocolate.”