Advertising designers seem to have had a lot more license to play like children back in the 1920s. These Belgian posters for the Union match manufacturer, show metamorphic matches at their finest and most absurd. The concept of creating flighty trade characters were possible inspired by Renaissance gargoyles, though twice as absurd. Trade characters were and are an obvious way to promote and differentiate competing products by adding a symbolic face to the name further etched the product onto the consumer’s conscious and subconscious. Mascots were fixtures of commercial culture by the late-nineteenth century to this day.
