Role: Creative Direction, Brand Design, Product Graphics Platform: Skater XL (PC and Steam Deck), distributed free on mod.io

Overview Weaselrat is a skate-inspired lifestyle brand with its roots in 90s culture. Its audience doesn’t just wear the brand, they skate, film and play. So instead of making ads to pull them toward the brand, we put the brand where they already spend their time: inside Skater XL, one of the most active skateboarding games on PC.

The result is the Weaselrat® Expansion Kit, a free pack of 29 pieces of in-game gear. Every piece is a real Weaselrat product, either on sale now or about to be announced.

The challenge Lifestyle brands compete for attention in crowded feeds. Paid social is expensive, and audiences increasingly scroll past it. We wanted a way to build awareness and drive real-world merch sales that felt like a gift to the community, not an interruption. For a skate brand, a skateboarding game isn’t a side channel, it’s home turf. Players spend hours customizing their skater, and what they choose to wear and ride says something about them. If Weaselrat gear is in that closet, the brand becomes part of how players express themselves, the same way it does in real life.

The approach Real products, not game merch. Every deck, tee, hoodie and hat in the kit matches a product in Weaselrat’s real lineup. A player who likes a hoodie in the game can buy the same hoodie, which turns play into a path to purchase.

Design that holds up on a 3D body. Flat print graphics behave differently once they’re wrapped around a moving character. Each piece was laid out on the game’s garment templates so logos land in the right place on the chest, back and hat front, and so nothing gets lost under a hood or across a seam.

14 decks

4 tees

2 hoodies

8 hats: snapbacks, 5-panels and cuffed beanies

A custom wheel set

The kit is available free on mod.io for Skater XL on Steam. It’s promoted through a dedicated download page on weaselrat.com and the Skater XL modding community.

Why this matters for brands Your customers already have places they love to spend time. For many lifestyle brands, some of those places are games. Bringing real products into those spaces does three things at once: it builds awareness with the exact audience you want, it gives fans a way to rep the brand, and it connects digital play back to physical sales.

It doesn’t take a custom game or an app. It takes knowing your audience, and the design craft to translate your brand faithfully into a new medium.

Interested in doing this for your brand? Let’s talk about where your audience already plays.