There are certain products you create because you have a carefully thought-out plan.
And then there's butter.
In early 2025, I was still very much immersed in the culinary world of Oliver the Owl and started playing with another idea: what if ordinary cooking ingredients became the design?
Butter. Sugar. Milk. Flour.
They all got their chance.
Butter won.
It started with a toddler tee.
The first butter design landed on a toddler T-shirt—a bright, playful little stick of butter packaging that I thought would look ridiculously cute on a tiny human.
Apparently, I wasn't alone.
The shirt became an Etsy Bestseller and remains one of the top-selling products in my shop.
From there, butter started showing up in increasingly unexpected places.
A bath mat? Absolutely.
A sweatshirt? Of course.
A luggage tag?
That one still makes me laugh.
The butter luggage tag started as a completely what if I put this on here? moment—and people have bought a surprising number of them.
Maybe that's when I realized there are, in fact, butter people.
So, who are the butter people?
They're the ones who don't want everything in their home to be sensible.
They're the gift givers who see something wonderfully specific and immediately think, OMG, that's SO her.
They're bakers, food lovers, vintage-kitchen people and anyone who appreciates an ordinary object with a little personality.
One customer even asked me to personalize the “packed by” line on a butter design with the name of a fictitious grocery store from a popular video game.
Which I loved.
Because that's exactly what these designs are supposed to be: a little unexpected and very much yours.
The brighter, the butter.
I've experimented with the collection over time—vintage typography, personalization, different colors and even a more refined blue-and-taupe version.
But customers have made their preference pretty clear.
Give them the yellow.
Give them the blue lettering.
Give them the measurement marks.
Give them the butter.
And I understand it. I own the buttery sweatshirt myself, and almost every time I wear it traveling or running errands, somebody notices it.
It gets a smile before it gets an explanation.
That's pretty much the goal.
Why butter?
Maybe it isn't quite as random as it sounds.
I grew up in a family where baking and scratch cooking were part of everyday life. My parents spent 36 years running the White House Cafeteria in Bismarck, and years later that world helped inspire Oliver's culinary adventures.
Butter certainly belonged there.
But Extra Butter, Please belongs to a different side of the story.
The playful side.
The side that believes your bath mat doesn't have to be beige, your luggage tag doesn't have to be boring and a gift is infinitely better when the person opening it starts laughing before the wrapping paper hits the floor.
There are more butter designs coming.
Because apparently one toddler T-shirt wasn't enough.
Extra Butter, Please is for people who love the unexpected.
And judging by the amount of butter leaving this shop, there are quite a few of us.
—Sonja
Zestful Productions
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