“Getting the right green” was a “tricky detail,” says Sigurd Gustafsson. The longtime design director for Dick’s Drive-In is responsible for the beloved Seattle restaurant’s newest holiday ornament (available online for $40), which this year celebrates the Dick’s Deluxe — a two-patty affair cloaked in copper-toned foil.
ArtSEA: Notes on Northwest Culture is a weekly arts newsletter from Cascade PBS.
Olivia Shjeflo, Dick’s director of marketing, told me that when the team decided to embark on the burger ornament, they agreed on a north star: “It has to be the same customer experience,” Shjeflo recalls, “The same experience of getting a Dick’s Deluxe, but on the tree.”
Gustafsson started with a burger mood board. What elements would best capture the essence and nostalgia of the Deluxe, which Dick’s introduced in 1972?
The resulting design brief includes directives regarding bun shape (slight divot in the top, “rarely a perfect dome”) and bun color (“a beautiful gradient from darker to light; small line of light brown representing the toasted edge”); the variegated greens of the lettuce; as well as the ingredient stack (a precise order, but imperfect alignment is authentic and OK).
You might be surprised to learn, as I was, that the ornament market is rife with burger options of all styles and materials. Dick’s could easily have chosen an existing template and stuck a logo on it. But Gustafsson wanted this burger to be “unmistakably Dick’s Drive-In.”
Even without the branding, he says, “A Dick’s customer should be able to identify it.”
Part of the ornament’s recognizability lies in the signature foil wrapper — “a warm, golden copper color,” Gustafsson says, which tags it immediately as the Deluxe (versus, say, the Special, which is swaddled in silver foil). One of the design specs was to have a bit of the white paper underside visible too, just as when you peel open the real thing.
As he has done for Dick’s limited-edition ornaments since 2021, Gustafsson collaborated with a Knoxville-based collectibles company called Joy to the World, which works with artisans across Europe — including Poland, where the Dick’s Deluxe ornament was brought to sizzling life.
“We sent some foil samples,” Gustafsson says, “and their craftsmen in Poland were able to craft the reflective nature of our Deluxe foil.”
He emphasizes that the Polish factory produces everything entirely by hand, “from clay sculpting to casting the mold to blowing the glass and finally hand-painting the ornaments.” (Glimpse the process, including a maker in Poland hand-painting American cheese.) “Truly a hand-crafted work of art,” Gustafsson adds.
In previous years Gustafsson has used the same process to create ornaments in the shape of Dick’s iconic sign, the white paper to-go bag and a Dick’s Drive-In location (all of which sold out). The last of those featured two cars, several customers and 10 different paint colors — making it even more difficult to render than this year’s meaty challenge of chopped lettuce.
Editor’s note: Looking for our recent newsletter story about Bloomberg Connects? It’s here.
Get the latest in local arts and culture
This weekly newsletter brings arts news and cultural events straight to your inbox.
