Two Faces From Hamburg

I’d seen these two faces countless times before, especially in bars and cafes around Denmark, but I’d never actually stopped to think about who they were. Turns out they belong to fritz-kola, a German drinks company started in Hamburg by two students, Mirco Wiegert and Lorenz Hampl.

When they started the company, they had basically no money for branding, so they used a black and white photo of their own faces for the logo. What started as a cheap solution ended up becoming the thing that made a bottle of Fritz instantly recognisable.

For over 20 years, those same two faces stayed pretty much untouched. Then in 2024, Fritz gave everything a refresh. The detailed, slightly rough looking faces became much simpler and bolder, which is the design you can see across these colourful caps.

There’s another strange detail though. They’re not actually the same two people anymore. Lorenz left the company in 2016, so when the logo was redesigned, his face was replaced with a newly illustrated one, while Mirco remained.

Then there are the colours. The same two faces appear again and again in completely different combinations, and when you put a load of them together there’s something very Andy Warhol about it. The repeated image, each one slightly different. They end up looking like tiny pieces of pop art rather than bottle caps.