Espresso Run: a color that earned its name somewhere in the mist. The Full Story.
Five days in the Scottish Highlands.
A Whole World: Andrew, Latona, and the Weekends That Shape a Dog's Life
There's a particular sound that starts most weekends for Andrew Mak and his wife, Latona: a camp stove clicking on before the tent is even fully unzipped. Two dogs are already awake, already ready to run. That's how Whole World, the short film behind our Espresso Run collection opens and it's as good an introduction as any to how this family actually lives.
A long way from Hong Kong.
Andrew and Latona both grew up in Hong Kong. They moved to Scotland and brought everything with them, including their language. Gizmo and Ponyo know commands in Cantonese like "sik6 faan6 " for mealtime, "heoi3 gaai1" for walkies because that's their first language, It just made sense. It tells you everything about how Andrew and Latona move through the world. The dogs aren't accommodated. They're included.
They hike and wild camp almost every weekend in the Highlands because they're close enough to make it a regular thing, not a special occasion. Edinburgh, they'll tell you, is one of the most dog-friendly cities in the UK. The cafes, the pubs, most of them welcome dogs without a second thought. But the Highlands are where Andrew and Latona really come into themselves. Mountains, ocean, castles. Highland cows that the whole world loves for reasons nobody needs to explain.
They weren't performing for the camera. They were just doing what they do every weekend. We happened to be there.
Gizmo and Ponyo.
Gizmo, the whippet, lean, fast, and entirely unbothered by anything that wasn't directly relevant to him. A whippet's precision applied to the business of being on camera.
Whippets don't do well in the cold, and the Highlands are not a forgiving environment for a dog built for speed over insulation. Gizmo wore his kit with the same quiet authority he brought to everything else. Nothing extra. Nothing missing.
Ponyo, the Dalmatian, she is the tank, fully loaded, always moving, always somewhere slightly unexpected. Zero degrees? Fine. Wet ground? Not a concern. A flock of sheep on the road to Edinburgh? Extremely interesting. She made every frame more alive just by being in it, and she covered more ground in five days than most people do in a month.
The Highlands suited them both perfectly, in entirely different ways.
It's a ritual before it's a color.
Espresso didn't start as a color name. It started as a feeling. The specific warmth of the first cup on a cold morning, made outside, before the day officially starts. Espresso is not a loud color, It sits, rich, deep, and entirely unshowy, the way a good kit should. It needed a landscape that would hold it honestly. Somewhere that would make it feel like it had always been there.
Scotland was the only answer.
The Scottish Highlands don't do performance. They do presence. Dark peat, wet trails, mist that settles over the hills and refuses to leave. It's the kind of terrain that makes everything feel matter-of-fact. The mornings were cold and quiet in the way that only happens when you're far enough from everything that the silence has texture to it. The coffee went on first. Every morning. Before the map, before the layers, before any shots. It became the whole creative territory.
The color that sits in a landscape like it grew there. Single origin. Multiple summits.Steam rising.
— Säker
