Vietnamese lacquer, sơn mài, gives a surface that is hard to reproduce in print. We designed a gift box with the lacquer artist Đinh Văn Sơn for 10Vill Coffee, and it took MUSE Gold in 2026. The notes below come from that project and from what the craft demands of a brief. The story of the box itself, from the first drawing to the photography, is in lacquer and eggshell: six months, 200 shells, one box.
Built in layers, then ground back
Lacquer is the sap of the sơn tree. It goes on in thin coats, and each coat has to cure fully, under controlled humidity, before the next is added. Colour comes from pigment and from materials laid into the layers, among them gold leaf and eggshell. The name describes the last step, since mài means to grind: the surface is sanded back until the layers underneath come through. Some of the image is put down early and buried under later coats, then uncovered by the grinding, so the artist works partly by subtraction and leaves some room for chance. That is where the depth comes from, and it is why a lacquer surface looks different from a printed gloss, however good the print.
Eggshell
For the inlay the shells are roasted, cracked and sorted by tone, and each fragment is set by hand into wet lacquer and polished back to reveal it. The fragments leave the fine crackle the technique is known for, and no two boxes carry the same pattern. On the 10Vill lid the coffee cherries are drawn in shell against a red ground, with gold leaf in the same layers, and the inlay was cut with a fine blade.
A craft with a history
Altar pieces, furniture and carved panels were being lacquered in Vietnam long before painters took the material up. In the 1930s, painters at the fine-arts school in Hanoi worked alongside lacquer artisans and developed it into a medium of its own. Eggshell, vermilion and gold leaf were among the materials used by Nguyễn Gia Trí, one of the best known of those painters. A brand that puts lacquer and eggshell on a pack is drawing on a tradition with its own standing in Vietnamese art, and the case page credits the artist next to the studio.
What it asks of a brief
Roles are worth settling early: the artist makes the lacquer, and our part on the 10Vill box was the motif, the specification in eggshell against lacquer, the structure that lets the lid read as one painted surface, and the photography. The drawing has to be made for a hand, which the earlier article describes. What the brief adds is a tolerance. Because no two pieces are identical, it should say what range of shell tone and density is acceptable, and approval should be given on a finished sample, not on a render.
Quantity and time come from the workshop, not from the printer. Curing cannot be hurried, and a workshop can make only so many pieces, so a lacquer box suits the top of a gift range better than the whole of it. The VAP, GWP and limited edition glossary sets out the tiers. A Tết project has to be commissioned a season earlier than a printed one, and the Tết packaging playbook shows the standard calendar it has to be set against.
Where it earns its place
The case for lacquer is strongest where the making is part of the story. The 10Vill box is built on reclaimed coffee wood, the coffee comes from Hamlet 10, and the case page shows the artist’s own lacquer painting of orchard, river and mountain beside the pencil studies made before the composition was transferred to lacquer. Where the making has no part in the story, a well-built rigid box with a good foil is the better use of a budget, and it can be produced in the volumes a gifting range needs. If the rest of the range is printed, the motif can travel to it as a pattern without the material, so that the lacquer top tier and the printed tiers read as one family.
The full case, with the process photographs, is on the 10Vill × Đinh Văn Sơn page. The place to start a brief like this is packaging design, and production covers the photography and film that go with it.
