- Brand
- Packaging
- Web
- Founder
Ljuta Herka: a hot sauce brand from a private joke
A personalized hot sauce from Herzegovina. You send a photo, it goes on the label, and the bottle ships with a Herzegovinian dictionary. I did everything except cook the sauce: brand, packaging, launch campaign, and the website with its ordering system.
- bottles, limited edition
- 100
- screen to order a personalized bottle
- 1
- hand-offs from design to live store
- 0
At a glance
The challenge
Turn a private joke into a real product: a personalized hot sauce gift, sold online, made by a partner producer.
What I did
Brand, label with a hand-drawn portrait, a dialect dictionary, an Instagram teaser launch and a custom ordering site with its own backend.
Outcome
A limited edition of 100 bottles, live at ljutaherka.com, designed and built end to end with AI coding tools.
01 · The idea
It started as a surprise
I wanted to surprise my girlfriend, whom I call "Ljuta Herka". It means roughly "the spicy Herzegovinian girl": proud and temperamental. So I did the logical thing and designed a brand for a product that didn't exist yet.
I didn't try to make the sauce myself. I partnered with a producer who already makes good hot sauce. Then the joke kept growing. She keeps teaching me Herzegovinian words I've never heard, so the bottle got a companion: a small dictionary called "Da se napokon razumijemo" ("so we finally understand each other"). And everyone knows someone who is a bit of a Ljuta Herka, or a Ljuti Herc, so a private joke became a product.
02 · Brand
Loud on purpose
The brand had to feel like the person it's named after. The palette is warning-tape yellow and chili red, the type is condensed and shouting, and the copy is in dialect. The tagline on the site is "Nije za slabe" ("not for the weak"). Each of the five heat levels has a name and a line, from "Normala brato" up to "Ćelopek: you're writing your will".
The label carries a hand-drawn portrait. On a personalized bottle, that portrait is the face of the person you're giving it to.
03 · Launch
A teaser campaign on Instagram
The launch ran as a short sequence on Instagram. "Pazi ljuto" (careful, hot) warning tape came first, then "Coming soon", then "Ljuta Herka je stigla" (she has arrived). Later posts explained how personalization works and what comes in the box. There is one visual system across all of it: yellow, red and warning tape.
04 · Website
Designed and built end to end
I designed the site and built it myself with AI coding tools: Next.js on Vercel, with a real ordering backend behind it. The whole flow sits on one page: who the bottle is for, their name, their photo and the heat level. I then removed steps until an order was one screen shorter. Shipping, address and quantity went into a single step.
Behind it is everything a small shop needs to run:
- Orders saved to a database, with photos uploaded to private storage
- An email notification for every new order; customers explicitly consent to their photo being used on the label
- An admin panel to review orders, see photos and update status
A separate "Story" page tells how it all began. It links to the producer who makes the sauce.
05 · Takeaways
Small product, whole company
What I took from it
- 01Scarcity is part of the product.
Only 100 bottles, "kad nestane, nestalo" (when it's gone, it's gone). The limit gives the gift its value.
- 02Let the idea set the voice.
A sauce named after a temperamental person can't speak like a corporate brand, so every line on the site is in dialect.
- 03Designers can ship now.
With AI coding tools I went from prototype to a live store with an ordering backend without handing anything off.
More work
All work →
Want to work together?
Whether it’s a product role, a bold project, sharing a beer or exploring a new corner of the world, I’m ready. I usually reply within a day.
