Everyone’s abuzz about two new players arriving on the Washington scene later this year, but they’re not on the ballot. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo announced Wednesday that Bao Li and Qing Bao, a pair of two-year-old giant pandas from China, will be making the zoo’s currently vacant panda habitat their new home by the end of the year.
Alongside the announcement, the zoo is offering a limited-edition line of “Pandas are Coming” merchandise, which includes hats, T-shirts, tote bags, water bottles, and even onesies.
The new black-and-white panda merch is pretty sweet. pic.twitter.com/NBWq1Q2GuK
— Jacob Fenston (@JacobFenston) May 29, 2024
A special team at the zoo worked with Atlanta-based graphic designer Courtney Garvin to conceptualize the new panda swag. If the design looks familiar, it’s because you’ve probably already seen the inspiration for it on art and wayfinding signs throughout the National Zoo. The merch adapts the zoo’s official exhibit icons, conceived in 1975 by designer Lance Wyman, while adding a conservation-forward twist.
Wyman’s original ’70s sketch of a panda in profile “inspired the profile of this particular graphic look,” the Zoo’s Acting Director of Communications Annalisa Meyer told Washingtonian. On new tees and totes, the panda’s good side pokes through bamboo culms in “a nod to our ecology work. It was very purposeful that [the design] included bamboo as well as the bear because our work is all about animal care research, as well as ecology work to save native habitat.”
Meyer said that panda-monium is often generational, passed down as people who fell in love as children with pandas at the zoo bring their families to see new bears. “Pandas find their way into people’s hearts,” she said. “It can often take connecting to one particular animal to make you care on a larger level about the species and about the natural world.”
Of course, panda merch is already readily available. The zoo’s new line has competition ranging from vintage items on eBay vintage-mongers to kitsch gift stores to the Smithsonian’s staple products. Even Metro has a panda collection.
The zoo’s new panda line is available online at nationalzoopanda.com and in person at the zoo’s gift shops.
