About
Creative Director/Designer:
Genes Sotto is a Creative Art Director with over 20 years of experience building brands that people feel before they fully understand them.
Trained at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, he studied under Michael Vanderbyl — one of the most influential designers of his generation — and left with something most design programs don't teach: the conviction that design isn't decoration. It's communication. It's identity. It's the difference between a product someone picks up and one they walk past.
That conviction took him from graphic design into fashion — and eventually brought him back.
He launched GENES, a contemporary men's and women's label that grew into a 10-year run — distributed across 180 boutiques and specialty stores in the US, Canada, and Japan, and featured in Glamour, InStyle, Lucky, and OK Magazine. Fashion taught him what no studio could: how to design for a human body, a retail floor, a consumer emotion, and a seasonal deadline — all at once.
From there, he brought that sensibility into the corporate world and never looked back. At Nest Labs, he led brand creative and retail design across one of the most design-forward product companies of its era — directing in-store fixtures, POS displays, and advertising campaigns for national retail partners including Home Depot and Best Buy. Then came Google.
As Creative Art Director for Google's Packaging, Devices & Services division through HH Global, Genes led the creative development of packaging across Google's entire home product portfolio — driving a full transition to sustainable, plastic-free design. The work earned back-to-back recognition in 2025: a Core77 Design Award and a Red Dot Design Award. Both grounded in the same principle he has carried since CCA — that the best design doesn't just look right. It means something.
Genes works at the intersection of brand strategy and hands-on craft. Equally fluent in a creative brief and a press check, in building a design team and executing the final detail himself. His clients and collaborators have included Google, Nest, Levi's, Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Bill Blass, Timex, and Rafaella.
New York spark. West coast vibe.