A Brand Session with Malissa Tran

After watching my friend Malissa's business explode through her viral TikToks — and being an early customer of her amazing matcha bowls — I knew I had to reach out. I asked if she'd be interested in doing a branding session with me while I tested my booking process, and she was on board! We met several years ago through our shared love of photography, and I've had the joy of watching Malissa grow into the incredible artist she is today. She was the perfect candidate for this project, and I was so excited to find a way to support her small business.

When I sent out the questionnaire, her answers were the kind that stick with you — honest and layered, equal parts playful and quietly profound. She described her business, Mal Designs, as "a love letter to her younger self who wasn't able to artistically express herself." I read that line and felt it land somewhere deep.

The Vision

Mal Designs is a handmade ceramic brand rooted in Asian-American identity. Malissa creates functional ceramic art inspired by her Vietnamese American heritage — pieces that carry the warmth of her immigrant parents' stories and the voice of a woman who spent years searching for where she belonged before finding it at the pottery wheel.

Her brand is nostalgic, simple, personal. Her color palette is earthy and organic: neutral creams and blacks punctuated by bold blues and greens, organic textures, the kind of palette that feels like coming home. And her personality? Playful, sarcastic, vulnerable, and radically honest.

For this session, the vision was to capture Malissa in her element — hands in the clay, surrounded by her finished pieces, alive in the act of making. Not a polished, posed version of herself, but the real one. The one who feels most herself with second-day curls, creative energy humming, and something beautiful taking shape in her hands.

The Shoot

Walking into a session like this, my job isn't just to take pretty pictures. It's to hold space for someone's story — to translate who they are into something visual and true. With Malissa, that meant following her energy rather than directing it. Letting the light find her. Letting the clay speak.

Every frame was built around one question: what does it feel like to be Malissa Tran?

The answer, I found, is warm and a little wild. Grounded and surprising. The kind of person who will make you laugh until it hurts and then say something profound that leaves your mind buzzing on your drive home.

The Story She's Telling

Malissa started making ceramics after what she calls "hating her job" — but what she really found at the wheel was permission. Permission to be terrible at something. Permission to play. Permission to stop performing perfection and start making things that mattered.

Her mission now is to create work that can't be found anywhere else in the world, and to use that work to connect the Asian American community through shared story. She honors her parents' immigration journey, her own experience of growing up feeling othered, and the beauty she has found in embracing the "mal" — the flaw, the imperfection — as something worth celebrating.

Every art piece is one-of-a-kind because she believes there is something sacred in the handmade. In the mark left by a human hand. In the object that could only have come from her.

A Note on This Work

Branding photography, at its best, is an act of collaboration and trust. It asks the subject to show up fully — not just with their products, but with their full selves — and it asks the photographer to be worthy of that vulnerability.

Malissa’s shared with me her laughter, her softness, her quiet focus when her hands were working. She let me into her creative world and trusted me to reflect it back with care.

These images are for her website, her social platforms, her reintroduction to the world she's building. But they are also, I hope, something more: a document of a woman who chose herself, chose her art, and is making something genuinely beautiful out of both.

Follow Malissa's journey at @mal.designs on Instagram, @malantran on TikTok, and at malantran.com.

Interested in a branding session of your own? I would love to help you tell your story.