Tag Archives: Pokemon

Someone Turned the Beats Pill Into a Diglett, and Now the Official Pikachu Version Looks Boring

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Pokémon turned 30 this year, and every brand with a product page seems to want a slice of the cake. Polaroid’s Pokémon cameras and the Fitbit Air Pokémon Sleep edition came first, and now Beats has joined in with a Pill. The speaker launched October 15 at $149.99 with Pikachu and Mimikyu across the grille, a gray body, and a Poké Ball charm on a matching lanyard. It’s a perfectly nice object. I’ll confess, though, that I looked at that gray capsule and thought a better Pokémon was sitting right there.

Courtyard.io shared a concept that makes the case, and it turns the Pill into Diglett. The brown grille wears glossy black eyes and a raised pink nose, and the whole thing rises out of a sculpted pile of gray rocks like it just popped out of a tunnel. A second render stacks three Pills into a Dugtrio on one shared mound. Diglett has been a capsule with a face since 1996, so this is the rare mashup where nobody has to squint. Consider this my case that the Pill’s best Pokémon was Gen 1 all along.

Designer: Courtyard_io

Diglett already has the Pill’s silhouette

Diglett is a head on a mound, which makes it a capsule with a face. Courtyard.io’s render keeps the Pill’s rounded cylinder untouched and wraps it in a clay brown grille, so the perforated mesh reads like packed soil. The Beats “b” sits low on the body in copper, just above the rocks, and the three-quarter shot shows the lighter tan side band running down the edge like a seam in the dirt. Nothing about the form had to bend to fit the character. That almost never happens in a collab, and it is the reason this concept looks so convincing at first glance.

The official Pokémon x Beats Pill takes the opposite route. It keeps a gray body, prints Pikachu and Mimikyu on the grille, and adds a Poké Ball charm, the first charm Beats has ever bundled with a Pill. That is a graphic on a speaker, and a handsome one. Beats has also done character Pills before, a history Apple’s Oliver Schusser cited when the 2024 model launched. A Diglett Pill would simply bring that idea back with a Pokémon attached, which is a much shorter walk than it sounds.

The glossy eyes, the pink nose, and a rock base that doubles as a stand

The grille is matte and finely perforated, while the eyes and nose are glossy, raised pieces that catch the light like a vinyl toy. That sheen difference gives the face a collectible-figure look without a single printed graphic. The rock base adds a third texture, a pebbly gray sculpt that gives the speaker something to stand in and sells the burrow illusion. Courtyard.io embossed its name into one of the boulders, which is a tidy way to sign your work. Every surface has a job, and none of them are shouting.

Picture the real hardware under that mesh. The 2024 Pill claims 24 hours of battery, so a Diglett could play through a full backyard party and still have juice for the next morning’s coffee. Its IP67 rating means dust-tight and able to survive a dunk in about three feet of water for 30 minutes, which suits a Pokémon that lives in dirt. At 680 grams (about 1.5 pounds), it is light enough to carry out to the garden. A speaker that hangs out in the flowerbed makes more sense to me than a gray one with a Poké Ball dangling off it.

The Dugtrio render and what Pokémon collabs could learn from it

The Dugtrio render stacks three Pills on a single rock mound, each with its own startled face and copper “b.” Beats currently pairs two Pills at a time, in Amplify Mode for more volume or Stereo Mode for left and right separation, so the third head would need a firmware update and a little optimism. At the official Pill’s $149.99, three speakers come to $449.97, which is one and a half pairs of the PUMA Suede Pikachu at $300 each. Dugtrio’s whole identity is being three Diglett, which makes it the one Pokémon where buying three speakers feels like a feature. I’d happily make that trade for a bookshelf trio that gets guests asking questions.

Most of the recent Pokémon collabs work by decoration. Polaroid wrapped a camera in Poké Ball patterns, Fitbit added a sleeping Pikachu label, PUMA bent a Formstrip into a bolt, and Beats printed two characters on a grille, all of it charming and most of it surface treatment. Courtyard.io’s Diglett goes the other direction by letting the object’s own shape do the talking, and the renders live on Courtyard.io’s X page for anyone who wants a closer look. The franchise has had a capsule-shaped character since 1996, and Beats has had a capsule-shaped speaker since 2012, so this introduction was overdue. Pikachu will always sell, but Diglett would get the laugh.

The post Someone Turned the Beats Pill Into a Diglett, and Now the Official Pikachu Version Looks Boring first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pokémon Beats Pill Adds Charms Without Raising the Price

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2026 is the year when Trainers everywhere celebrate Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, so we expected a lot of new merchandise, themed events, and collaborations with other well-known brands. We’ve seen footwear and apparel rollouts with adidas and PUMA, LEGO sets, even a partnership with the European Space Agency, and food collaborations like Pokémon-themed Hershey’s Kisses. If you’re looking for audio equipment featuring your favorite monster, you’re in luck with this newly announced collaboration.

The Pokémon Beats Pill is a Bluetooth speaker announced by audio brand Beats in partnership with The Pokémon Company International. It features two familiar Pokémon characters, the ubiquitous Pikachu and the more mysterious Mimikyu. It brings the bright yellow and minimalist gray associated with these characters to a portable speaker with what Beats calls its signature sound. Both Beats collectors and Pokémon Trainers may want to have this special-edition collaboration to bring their music and other audio content to life.

Designers: Beats x Pokémon

The speaker’s design is a contrast between the electric yellow most identified with Pikachu and a grayscale interpretation of Mimikyu, with the latter hiding beneath a cloth that resembles the former. More than just attaching a logo to the Bluetooth speaker, this is a character-driven design. Both Pokémon appear on the grille, while the speaker itself remains compact and elongated like other Beats Pill devices.

According to Beats, this is also the first Pill release that comes with charms. Trainers who like collecting accessories get the iconic Poké Ball, Pikachu-inspired lightning bolts, and the equally recognizable Beats “b.” The color-matched gray carry lanyard is removable, so there’s a practical carrying accessory alongside the collectible details. It also comes with interactive packaging, which Beats says includes a movable piece, plus special-edition stickers. The exact packaging mechanism isn’t explained in detail on the collaboration page.

The familiar shape has a practical side, too. Its 20-degree upward tilt is designed to direct sound toward your ears when it sits on a table, while the soft-grip silicone backing is intended to make it easier to hold. At 8.6 inches long and 24 ounces, it’s portable enough for a bag, although not pocket-sized. Keeping the existing Pill shape also means the Pokémon treatment doesn’t turn it into a bulky character figurine that needs its own dedicated space.

Specs-wise, the speaker has a bespoke acoustic system that Beats says delivers room-filling sound and deep bass for your favorite tunes, podcasts, or audiobooks. It offers up to 24 hours of battery life and has an IP67 rating for dust and water resistance. That battery figure is a manufacturer claim, not a guarantee for every listening session. You can also charge a compatible phone from the speaker via USB-C, using some of its battery in the process.

You can listen over Bluetooth or plug in a compatible device via USB-C for high-resolution lossless audio. The wired connection matters here; lossless playback isn’t being promised over Bluetooth. You can even pair two Beats Pills together in Amplify Mode or Stereo Mode. The former synchronizes playback across both speakers, while the latter separates the left and right channels. You’ll need a second Pill for either option.

The speaker also supports both iOS and Android devices, so you don’t need an iPhone to use it. One-touch pairing and supported device-location features add to its everyday usefulness. It can also serve as a speakerphone, letting you take calls through the paired speaker rather than reaching for your phone every time. The Pokémon Beats Pill is scheduled to become available in the United States for $149.99 on October 15, 2026, at 8 a.m. PDT, through Apple and Target online and at select Target stores.

For Pokémon fans, the appeal is having a collectible that doesn’t have to stay on a shelf. The collaboration’s announced changes focus on appearance, accessories, and packaging, rather than a Pokémon-specific audio upgrade. If you already own a Pill, the reason to choose this one is mainly the character treatment. For someone looking for a portable speaker, though, Pikachu and Mimikyu give a familiar everyday device some personality.

The post Pokémon Beats Pill Adds Charms Without Raising the Price first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pikachu Just Got Hidden Inside Your Coffee Mug, and Pokémon Fans Are Going to Lose It

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Pikachu has appeared on a lot of things over the past 30 years — Alfredo Häberli’s Origo tableware wasn’t exactly the obvious next stop. Finnish design brand Iittala has reimagined its beloved Origo tableware collection in collaboration with Pokémon, marking 30 years of the Japanese media giant with a trio of pieces that feel both nostalgic and entirely fresh. A mug, a plate, and a bowl — each one a small study in restraint meeting playfulness.

Origo is no stranger to cult status. Originally designed by Alfredo Häberli in 1999, the striped tableware has long been a fixture in Finnish homes, celebrated for its simple geometry and quiet charm. For this collaboration, Häberli returned to his own work, subtly shifting the collection’s signature stripes into a warm palette of yellow, red, and brown — tones drawn directly from Pikachu, Pokémon’s most recognisable character. The result doesn’t shout. It earns its second glance.

Designer: Iittala & Pokémon

That restraint extends to how Pikachu appears across the pieces. Black and white illustrations are tucked onto the insides of the mug, plate, and bowl, as well as their bases — small discoveries rather than declarations. “Pikachu is almost ‘adventuring’ across the collection, adding a layer of surprise and charm,” said Janni Vepsäläinen, Iittala’s creative director, who joined the brand in 2023 after a tenure at JW Anderson.

Vepsäläinen was candid about the unexpected nature of the pairing. “At first glance, Iittala and Pokémon might seem like an unlikely match, two worlds that don’t obviously touch,” she said. “But that quiet friction is exactly what drew us in.” It’s the kind of creative logic that tends to produce the most interesting work — not two brands that naturally overlap, but two identities whose contrast makes the collaboration worth paying attention to.

The emotional hook is the 1990s. Both Origo and Pokémon were born in that decade, and the collaboration leans into that shared origin with intention. “Design culture from that era continues to feel relevant today — timeless products that still spark joy,” Vepsäläinen noted. It’s a sentiment that holds. There’s a reason Origo never left Finnish kitchen tables, and a reason Pikachu never needed a rebrand.

What Iittala has done here is resist the temptation to over-design the moment. The Pikachu Origo collection doesn’t try to be a statement. It simply invites a little joy into the everyday — a flash of yellow on the breakfast table, a small illustration at the bottom of your coffee cup. As Vepsäläinen put it, “Pikachu brings happiness across generations.” On the evidence of these pieces, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

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You Can Actually Sleep Inside a Real Poké Ball Now

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Every themed hotel room I’ve ever stayed in has let me down in the same predictable way. You book something that promises a full transformation and what you actually get is a normal room with a poster taped above the headboard and maybe a branded bathrobe. The fantasy stays exactly that: a fantasy, dressed up just enough to justify the price tag but never committed to.

That’s the problem Not A Hotel and Pokémon Sleep just solved, and they did it by refusing to compromise on the one detail that actually matters: scale. When I covered the teaser announcement for this project a couple weeks back, all we had was a mystery location “somewhere in Hokkaido” and a promise that more would come. That promise has now been kept in full, and it turns out the reality is stranger and more specific than the teaser let on.

Designers: Not A Hotel for Pokémon

The Poké Ball-Themed Hotel isn’t a room shaped like a Poké Ball. It’s a genuine three-meter sphere, built from molded acrylic hemispheres, sitting on a lakeshore in Tomakomai, Hokkaido. You don’t walk into a themed suite. You walk into the object itself.

Pokémon fans have wanted this since 1996, back when a Poké Ball was just a red-and-white circle you clicked on a Game Boy screen. Thirty years later, someone treated that daydream as an actual architectural brief instead of a marketing bullet point. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Most brand collaborations settle for surface-level nostalgia. This one committed to the geometry, the materials, and the mechanics of the thing fans actually pictured.

The interior backs that up. A round mattress fills the space under a curved acrylic window that frames the lake outside, which sounds almost too on-the-nose until you remember that’s exactly what people wanted: to look out from inside the ball, not just sleep in a room that name-checks one. The washroom is tiled in colors pulled straight from Snorlax, which is a small touch, but it’s the kind of detail that tells you somebody on this project actually cares about Pokémon lore rather than just licensing the logo.

The feature that really makes it stand out for me is the iPad. Guests pick a favorite Pokémon before lights out, and the room’s interior lighting shifts to match that choice once it’s dark. It’s a quiet piece of engineering, but it does something most themed spaces never manage: it makes the experience personal instead of generic. You’re not sleeping in “the Pokémon room.” You’re sleeping in your room, themed around your Pokémon, for one night only.

That personalization lines up with the actual point of Pokémon Sleep, the app this whole thing was built to celebrate alongside the franchise’s 30th anniversary. The app already turns your real sleep data into something like a game, rewarding rest instead of just tracking it. Flipping that idea inside out, so you’re the one visiting the Poké Ball instead of the Pokémon visiting you, is a clever bit of design logic that never feels forced.

Here’s the part that keeps this from being pure hype, though: almost nobody is actually going to stay there. This isn’t a hotel you book. It’s a lottery. Ten pairs of guests, chosen through a campaign on X, will get one free night each between October 8 and 18. You need to be a Japan resident, at least 18, running the Pokémon Sleep app, and willing to follow the account and fill out a survey. Applications close September 30. Everyone else, myself included, gets to look at the photos.

I won’t pretend that scarcity doesn’t sting a little, especially after following this story since the first teaser. But it also protects the thing that makes this project work in the first place. A structure like this, treated as a limited, almost sacred experience instead of a photo-op hotel room anyone can post about for a weekend, keeps the whole idea from curdling into a gimmick. Not A Hotel built something that looks like it was made for one specific kind of joy: the moment a lifelong fan realizes their favorite piece of childhood imagination has real acrylic walls around it now. That’s a strange, small, oddly moving thing to build a hotel around. I respect that they did it without cutting corners.

The post You Can Actually Sleep Inside a Real Poké Ball Now first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pokémon Just Made the World’s First Human-Sized Poké Ball Hotel

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Anyone who’s a huge fan of the Pokémon universe has probably, at one time or another, dreamed about waking up inside that world surrounded by their favorite creatures, training and catching them. Sure, you’d probably turn into an animated character (unless it’s more like the live-action Detective Pikachu, which blended both worlds), but it would still be a blast to run around and try to catch ’em all.

Well, your dream might just come true, to some extent. Japanese hospitality brand NOT A HOTEL has partnered with The Pokémon Company, specifically the Pokémon Sleep app, to create a Poké Ball-Themed Hotel somewhere in the forests of Hokkaido, giving fans the rare chance to spend the night inside a human-sized Poké Ball and maybe wake up imagining Snorlax and Jigglypuff wandering nearby.

Designer: The Pokémon Company x NOT A HOTEL

Usually, when a hotel offers a “themed” room, you just get some decorations and maybe a few painted walls inside an otherwise ordinary building. But this one is nothing like that. It’s a detached, freestanding spherical structure set outdoors, somewhere amid Hokkaido’s wilderness. Think of it as camping, or more accurately glamping, except instead of a tent, you’re sleeping inside a giant ball. NOT A HOTEL is known for building one-of-a-kind architectural homes rather than cookie-cutter rooms, so if anyone can pull off turning a cartoon object into a livable structure without it feeling like a cheap novelty prop, it’s them.

The collaboration is actually built around Pokémon Sleep, the mobile sleep-tracking app that just celebrated its third anniversary. The app gamifies your bedtime by “catching” Pokémon based on your real sleep data. This hotel flips that concept on its head: instead of having the creatures visit you while you sleep, you’re the one visiting their world instead. Well, sort of. Let’s just say your imagination will probably run wild the moment you check into your very own Poké Ball.

Interestingly, the project uses the international name “Poké Ball” rather than “Monster Ball,” which is what the item is officially called in Japan. That small detail suggests this experience is designed to welcome fans from all over the world, not just domestic travelers.

We don’t have a ton of details yet, but everything is set to be revealed on September 15, including how the whole thing will actually work. Based on what’s been shared so far, this won’t be a simple online booking like a typical hotel stay. It sounds like it’ll be run more like a limited, lottery-style campaign, meaning only a lucky handful of selected guests will actually get to spend the night inside. The exact location in Hokkaido is also still being kept a secret, adding an extra layer of mystery to the whole reveal.

Fair warning: whether it ends up being a paid stay, a members-only perk, or a straight-up giveaway, it’s probably safe to assume this won’t be an easy ticket to get. But honestly, that’s probably a small price to pay (literally or figuratively) to fulfill a childhood dream you never thought would actually happen. It’s a genuinely clever marketing move, one that’s perfectly engineered to hook die-hard Pokémon fans and casual travelers hunting for a one-of-a-kind experience, all at once.

At the end of the day, this is one of those rare collaborations that actually makes sense on every level. It’s not just slapping a familiar logo onto a hotel room and calling it a day. It’s a legitimate design experiment that ties directly back to the game it’s promoting, wrapped in the kind of nostalgia that makes Pokémon fans of literally every age stop scrolling. Whether or not you personally end up snagging one of the extremely limited spots, it’s still fun to imagine what it might feel like to fall asleep inside a giant red-and-white sphere, tucked away in the quiet forests of Hokkaido.

So mark your calendar for September 15. That’s when NOT A HOTEL and The Pokémon Company are expected to lift the curtain on pricing, application details, and what the inside of this thing actually looks like. Until then, all we can do is speculate, dream, and maybe rewatch a few old Pokémon episodes to get in the mood. After all, this might be the closest any of us ever get to living out that childhood fantasy of stepping straight into the Pokémon world.

The post Pokémon Just Made the World’s First Human-Sized Poké Ball Hotel first appeared on Yanko Design.

Fitbit Just Made Snorlax the Motivation Your Sleep Tracker Was Missing

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Sleep tracking has a credibility problem. Wearables can tell you exactly how long you were in light sleep and precisely when your deep sleep dropped off, but none of that information comes with a reason to care about it enough to actually change your behavior. The Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep, at $129.99, takes a different approach to motivation: your sleep score feeds directly into a game, and Snorlax is waiting.

The Pokémon Sleep app already had this mechanic before the Fitbit collaboration. Sleep well, generate Drowsy Power, and more Pokémon show up around Snorlax in the morning with their own sleeping styles to research and log. What the Fitbit Air adds is a wrist-based tracker that captures the data automatically, running it through Google Health, which then pipes it into the app via Health Connect on Android or Apple Health on iOS. You wake up and open the app. That’s it.

Designer: Google, The Pokemon Company

The hardware is the same screenless Fitbit Air that launched in May 2026, which is worth understanding. It weighs 12 grams with the band, resists water to 50 meters, monitors heart rate, SpO2, skin temperature, and atrial fibrillation, and the battery runs up to seven days between charges. A five-minute charge returns roughly one day of use. None of those specs changed for the special edition. What changed is the band, the packaging, and a three-month Google Health Premium trial included in the box.

The band is Sleepy Blue, a soft textile with a champagne-gold stainless-steel buckle and a silk-printed Sleeping Pikachu label on the strap. The micro-adjustable design is the same as the standard model, designed to sit close enough that it doesn’t shift during sleep without feeling restrictive. Sleep tracking only works reliably if the tracker stays in contact with your skin all night, so the comfort argument isn’t incidental.

Naps count toward Drowsy Power, not just overnight sessions, which is a small but genuinely useful detail. It means the tracker rewards rest across the full day rather than treating a nine-hour night as the only path to progress. People with irregular schedules or who rely on afternoon naps get the same feedback loop as anyone with a consistent bedtime routine.

This is Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, which is part of why the collaboration exists in the form it does. The Snorlax-themed packaging, the silk-print label, and the Sleepy Blue colorway are all timed to that milestone rather than representing a permanent product direction. It’s a collector’s object that also happens to work as a serious sleep tracker, and the two things coexist without competing.

The Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep is available for preorder at the Google Store and Target, with shipping starting September 15. It’s a $30 premium over the standard Air, for a band that looks like a Pokémon game, a branded box, and a trial of the coaching service. For Pokémon Sleep players who need a new tracker anyway, that math is fairly simple.

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Polaroid Just Made the Pokémon Camera Every Fan Wants

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It’s been 30 years since Pokémon invaded our lives and we’ve witnessed a whole generation of trainers trying to catch them all. The beloved franchise has had several exciting tie-ups with various brands in the past months to celebrate this momentous anniversary, and each one has gotten us excited to collect these interesting collaborations. From clothing to gaming gear, it’s been a year of Pokémon everywhere you look.

If you’re into the whole analog photography trend, then you’ll be truly excited (like me) about this newest brand partnership. The Polaroid x Pokémon collection is more than just logos and pictures stuck onto cameras. It’s one of their largest collaborative efforts, bringing together the tactile joy of analog instant photography and the beloved Pokémon universe into nine limited-edition pieces that are equal parts functional and collectible.

Designer: Polaroid x Pokémon

The main characters in this collection are of course the three special-edition Polaroid cameras. The Polaroid Now Generation 3 camera now comes in a Poké Ball version and is the hero piece of this entire collaboration. The camera’s body comes in white with bold red and black accents, just like the iconic instrument you use to capture the creatures. It has a Poké Ball shutter button and Poké Ball patterns across the full camera body, making it your tool to capture moments instead of Pokémon but looking almost exactly the part. Beyond the design, the Polaroid Now Gen 3 also packs a solid technical punch with a two-lens autofocus system that automatically chooses the best lens for each shot, so every memory comes out crisp and beautifully Polaroid-esque.

Meanwhile, the smaller but equally famous Polaroid Go cameras have been transformed into two Pokémon-themed devices that go well beyond just having a logo attached to them. You have the Pikachu Edition, which comes in the franchise’s distinct, vibrant yellow, complete with a Poké Ball shutter button and a lightning-bolt tail wrist strap to carry it around. The Sylveon edition, meanwhile, features pink, white, and blue fairy-type colorways, along with Sylveon graphics and a themed wrist strap. Both are built on the Polaroid Go Generation 3 platform, also known as the world’s smallest instant analog camera, making them as pocket-friendly as they are charming.

Aside from the cameras, there are other items in the collection worth getting excited about. There are three exclusive Pokémon-edition film packs, each featuring custom-designed frames and dark slides that make every print feel like a collectible. For the Polaroid Now Gen 3, the i-Type Color Film pack comes with Poké Ball-motif frames. For the Go Gen 3 cameras, you have the Pikachu Edition and Pokémon Edition Go Color Film packs, the latter featuring beloved characters like Eevee and Togepi. These aren’t just rolls of film; they’re tiny pieces of Pokémon art wrapped around every shot you take.

If you want to fully accessorize your Pokémon camera setup, the collection has you covered there, too. There’s the Polaroid Go camera case designed as a round Poké Ball zip case, the Polaroid Go Photo Album styled in the same Poké Ball design for storing your instant prints, and a universal camera strap with a matching Poké Ball pattern. That strap is a particularly thoughtful touch, as it works with both the Polaroid Now Gen 3 and the Go Gen 3, keeping your entire setup looking cohesive no matter which camera you bring out.

The entire nine-piece collection launches globally in limited quantities, so this one is for the early birds. Pre-orders open on August 25, 2026 on polaroid.com and through the Pokémon Center in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, with the full global release dropping on October 5, 2026. Whether you’re a lifelong Pokémon fan, a Polaroid collector, or simply someone who loves a beautifully designed limited-edition drop, this collection is genuinely hard to pass up. After all, why just catch Pokémon when you can capture your best moments with them, too?

The post Polaroid Just Made the Pokémon Camera Every Fan Wants first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Maker Spent Months Building a Pokéball That Jumps and Shoots Smoke

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Pokémon has always sold us a very specific fantasy: a compact sphere you can throw into tall grass, watch shimmy three times, and hear that satisfying click. The wiggle is practically cultural shorthand at this point. So when maker Kiara’s Workshop decided to skip the wiggle entirely and build the far stranger, far older Arceus ball instead, the resulting creation landed somewhere between prop design, mechanical engineering, and sheer stubbornness. The kind of project that sounds manageable until you’re three failed prototypes deep.

For context: the Arceus ball comes from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a game set in a much earlier era of the Pokémon world. This isn’t the sleek, mass-produced Pokéball most of us grew up clicking in handheld games. It’s a more primitive artifact, made from Apricorns and Tumblestones in the game’s lore, with an aesthetic that leans ancient and earthy rather than factory-fresh. And its in-game behavior is notably different too. Instead of the classic wiggle sequence, the Arceus ball shoots into the air during a catch and releases a burst of smoke. It’s more dramatic, more theatrical, and a far more interesting design brief.

Designer: Kiara’s Workshop

Kiara’s Workshop had already built functional Pokéballs before, putting out a V1 and V2 that earned a loyal following and a comment section full of people asking when she’d make more. The V3 of the standard Pokéball was still on her list when she decided to take a detour and come back to Pokéballs a different way. The Arceus ball seemed like the simpler bet. It doesn’t have the same intricate mechanical catch sequence as the modern version, so how hard could it be? The answer, as it turned out, was very hard. The build required research, iteration, and a willingness to start over.

Getting a physical object to jump on cue and simultaneously release smoke on command is not exactly a weekend project. The ancient aesthetic of the ball adds another layer of complexity: it can’t look like it came out of a clean resin mold. It needs texture, weight, and a certain handmade quality that actually complicates production rather than simplifying it. Every element Kiara worked through pointed back to how much thought went into the original game design, even for something that appears on screen for only a few seconds at a time.

Here’s the thing about maker culture that doesn’t get enough attention: it forces a kind of reverse-engineering that’s deeply respectful of the original design, whether that original designer was a game developer or a prop team. When you have to physically build something that only existed as a rendered animation, you start noticing all the decisions that went into it. Kiara’s build is less about having a cool collectible on a shelf (though it would absolutely win any shelf) and more about understanding how design translates, or refuses to translate, between worlds. That’s a genuinely underrated form of design criticism.

Pokémon as a franchise has always been smart about its own mythology. The progression from handcrafted Apricorn balls to industrially manufactured ones mirrors real-world design evolution, from artisanal craft to mass production. What Kiara’s Workshop did was reverse that arc entirely, going from the pixel back to the physical, from the streamlined modern version to the awkward, jumping, smoke-releasing ancient one. It’s a move that requires understanding both the fiction and the fabrication. The result is genuinely impressive, not because it’s a perfect replica, but because it functions on its own terms. It jumps. It smokes. It exists in a way it never was supposed to.

Plenty of makers are building Pokéballs right now, probably on multiple continents simultaneously. But most are going for the one everyone recognizes. Choosing the Arceus ball, with all its mechanical demands and its ancient visual language, says something about what excites Kiara’s Workshop: not the familiar, but the forgotten. And for anyone who’s ever quietly preferred the stranger corners of a franchise over its most iconic pieces, that’s a choice worth appreciating.

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Pokémon and adidas partner for 12 nostalgic sneakers fans will want to wear, landing in September

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Pop Culture brands often turn to sneaker fanfare from time to time. This time around, it’s Pokémon that’s treading the collaboration route. For its 30th anniversary celebration, Pokémon is joining forces with adidas Originals for a comprehensive collection of 12 Pokémon x adidas Originals 30th Anniversary Sneakers.

As you’d expect from the names involved, the collaborative silhouettes blend the ‘90s nostalgia with modern streetwear style, giving those who have grown up playing Red and Blue on Nintendo Game Boy a reason to rekindle their memories.

Designer: Pokémon x adidasPokémon x adidas

Since its inception in 1996, Pokémon has evolved from the screens of the Game Boy to become one of the highest-grossing media franchises. The incredible journey is reflected through the signifying colors, textures, and unique structural add-ons that show up on the sneakers to portray the distinctive antics of various Pokémon.

The global release of the Pokémon-inspired sneaker collection is scheduled for September 2026. The sneakers that we are looking at include the adidas charms like the Samba, Superstar, and the Gazelle. These have been reimagined for Pokémon fans with colors and motifs to celebrate their beloved characters.

The highlight of the collaboration is three models designed after the lavender tones of Mewtwo. Other motifs embracing the collection include the wing-shaped overlays of Charizard and the textured yellow sneaker uppers drawn from Pikachu. A Pro Model and one Superstar iteration use fuzzy yellow uppers mimicking the Pikachu fur texture and are completed with Poké Ball lace dubraes.

The other Superstar silhouette is presented with a clean white base. The base is covered in an all-over graphic Pikachu print. A Charizard-inspired Superstar sneaker features a wing-shaped flap overlaying the eyelets, a nod to the character’s draconic form. As mentioned earlier, it’s Mewtwo that adidas and Pokémon have given the most attention. Mewtwo ZX 8000 sneaker design features a Master Ball lace charm with lavender and violet tones and horn-like ears to complement the character. The other two models are an original Samba and Handball Spezial. The latter has a heel loop inspired by the cord-like add-on extending from the back of Mewtwo’s neck.

Every pair of sneakers in the collection is a sublime blend of both brands. While adidas has gone ahead and presented its best models, Pokémon has left no stone unturned to ensure they are a true symbolic representation of what it represents. For the fans willing to open their wallets for a pair of adidas footwear with Pokémon branding, the commemorative sneakers are likely to retail between $110 and $180.

30th Anniversary Collection of Pokémon x adidas Originals will make a global debut in September this year and will be available via the adidas online store and select retailers.

 

 

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