Behind the Design: Petesgiving 40 Years and the Launch of Pierre’s by the Sea

In Neptune Beach, Florida, there are few institutions with more history, personality, and cultural gravity than Pete’s Bar. Established in 1933, Pete’s is widely recognized as the oldest bar in Duval County and a landmark that has helped shape the identity of the Jacksonville Beaches for generations.

From Thanksgiving morning gatherings to late-night pool games, Pete’s Bar represents a place where the community shows up year after year to celebrate life at the beach. Among its longest-running traditions is Petesgiving, the annual Thanksgiving Day street celebration that has grown into one of the most beloved events in Northeast Florida.

What began in the mid-1980s as an informal holiday meet-up outside Pete’s has evolved into a full-scale neighborhood ritual. Thousands of residents, returning locals, and visitors now make their way to First Street every Thanksgiving morning for a day of drinks, conversation, and people watching in front of one of Florida’s most iconic dive bars. Petesgiving has become part of the local calendar in the same way holidays and football season are: it is simply understood that this is where you go.

This year’s Petesgiving marked the 40th anniversary of the celebration and introduced an important new chapter in the Pete’s Bar story: the grand opening of Pierre’s by the Sea, a dedicated merchandise shop and general store located next door. For this milestone year, 63 Visual had the opportunity to develop the event branding, merchandise graphics, and visual system that ties the heritage of Pete’s to this new retail experience.

Honoring 40 Years of Petesgiving Tradition Through Design

Designing for a 40-year-old neighborhood tradition requires creating artwork that looks good on shirts and posters, but also to build visuals that feel like they could have always been part of the story. A place like Pete’s Bar already has an established tone and personality. The branding has to respect that history rather than compete with it.

The creative direction started with the characteristics that have defined Pete’s for generations:

• Authenticity and a proudly no-frills attitude
• A strong sense of tradition and heritage
• Community and storytelling as the core of the brand
• Humility, grit, and a sense of humor
• A visual aesthetic rooted in vintage Americana and hand-drawn typography

Nothing about Pete’s feels overly polished or trend driven. The bar’s strength comes from the fact that it has stayed remarkably consistent over time. With that in mind, the design direction leaned into vintage print illustration, hand-done line work, and typography inspired by old bar signs, matchbooks, and 1960s screen prints. The color palette is warm and slightly muted, the way ink looks after it has lived on a favorite T-shirt for a decade.

For the 40-year anniversary, a primary badge serves as the anchor for the visual system. It features bold type, a classic banner treatment, and character illustrations like the sunglasses-wearing Pilgrim salt and pepper shaker couple raising beer mugs. Supporting graphics include a turkey illustration, seasonal foliage, and small icons that reference beer, leaves, and coastal Florida life. These pieces show up on T-shirts, posters, and merchandise in a way that feels unified but not corporate.

The key was to make the artwork screen-print friendly and timeless. Clean silhouettes, consistent line weights, and simple shapes keep the illustrations graphic and readable at a distance, while small details and textures reward people who get closer. The final system feels like it could have been pulled from a stack of well-loved event shirts collected over the decades.

Building a Visual System Around a Neighborhood Institution

A large community event like Petesgiving requires more than a single logo. The visual language has to scale across environments, formats, and applications. For this project, the Petesgiving 40th anniversary system was built around a set of flexible components:

• A hero badge with “Petesgiving,” “40 Years,” and the established dates
• Character illustrations that can stand alone or be used together
• Secondary badges and icons for sleeves, tags, and small placements
• Typography treatments that can adapt for posters, signage, and social graphics
• A consistent color system that prints well on a variety of garment colors and paper stocks

Because most of the artwork is hand-drawn, the system keeps its personality even when elements are rearranged or scaled for different uses. A badge that appears on a poster can be simplified for a chest print. An illustration that works as a main graphic on a shirt can also become a subtle hit on a hat or mug. That flexibility allows Pete’s to continue releasing new merchandise each year without needing to rebuild the brand from scratch.

At its core, the Petesgiving identity is about celebrating a neighborhood institution that has been part of people’s lives for decades. The visuals are meant to feel familiar, like they have been part of family photo backdrops and Thanksgiving stories for longer than anyone can remember.

The Launch of Pierre’s by the Sea

For years, Pete’s Bar merchandise was something of an underground collectible among locals and frequent visitors. Shirts, hats, and koozies would appear far from Neptune Beach, worn by people who had a story about “their” Pete’s Bar experience. The opening of Pierre’s by the Sea takes that organic tradition and gives it a permanent home.

Pierre’s by the Sea is a dedicated general store and merch shop that sits just a few steps from the front door of Pete’s. The space carries apparel, drinkware, gifts, skateboards, and exclusive limited-run items that celebrate both the bar and the surrounding beach community. The goal for the Pierre’s identity was to build a brand that clearly lives in the Pete’s Bar universe while still having its own personality.

Where the core Pete’s identity leans into classic dive-bar grit, Pierre’s introduces a breezier coastal tone inspired by old Florida postcards, vintage general stores, and classic boardwalk iconography. Key visual themes include:

• A relaxed mermaid mascot holding a drink, used across shirts, signage, and bags
• Hand-drawn illustrations of the Jacksonville Beach pier, palm trees, and shoreline
• Lettering that blends mid-century script with clean sans-serif type
• Soft, sun-faded color palettes that feel at home in a beach house or on weathered storefront wood

Even with these new elements, the connection to Pete’s stays clear. The Pete’s Bar wordmark appears as an endorsement mark within many of the Pierre’s graphics, reinforcing the idea that this is not a separate retail concept but an extension of a familiar local brand. The result is a visual system that feels like it could have been part of Neptune Beach for decades while still offering plenty of room for future product lines and collaborations.

Designing Merch for Locals, Regulars, and Returning Beach Kids

Effective merchandise design is about more than putting a logo on a shirt. The best pieces become part of a person’s identity—they are what people pack when they fly home for the holidays, what they wear when they want to signal where they are from, and what they pull on for casual days at the beach.

For the Petesgiving and Pierre’s collections, the design approach treated each piece as something that needed to work on its own, not just as a supporting asset. The collections include:

• Event-specific Petesgiving 40-year T-shirts and sweatshirts
• Graphic tees featuring the classic Pete’s Bar sign and Ripper skeleton homage
• One-color and two-color prints designed for long-term wear, not just a single event
• Coastal-inspired Pierre’s by the Sea tees, tote bags, and accessories
• Red, white, and blue “USA” themed beer glass illustrations for summer and holiday drops

Each illustration was drawn with printing and production in mind. Clean silhouettes, limited color counts, and consistent line weights help ensure that the artwork will reproduce well on fabric and maintain its character over time. Many designs are built as one-color prints that feel right at home on worn-in cotton, creating the kind of pieces that people reach for again and again.

A Living Brand Rooted in Place

One of the most rewarding parts of working on the Pete’s Bar and Pierre’s by the Sea project is the reminder that branding is at its best when it is grounded in real stories. Pete’s does not need to manufacture a narrative. The history is already there in the regulars, the families who have been stopping in for generations, and the people who plan their Thanksgiving travel around being in Neptune Beach for Petesgiving.

Design in this context is less about invention and more about translation. The goal is to take what already exists—the dive-bar patina, the familiar sign, the way the street looks on Thanksgiving morning—and give it a visual language that can live on posters, garments, and signage without losing its honesty. When that is done well, the branding becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared experience.

Petesgiving 40 Years and the launch of Pierre’s by the Sea represent an important chapter in that ongoing story. The event branding and merch give people new ways to carry a piece of Neptune Beach with them, whether they live a few blocks away or only make it back once a year.

Looking Ahead

As Pierre’s by the Sea grows and new Petesgiving seasons arrive, the visual system built for this milestone year is designed to keep expanding. New illustrations, seasonal collections, and collaborations can plug into the existing framework without losing the core character of Pete’s Bar.

For 63 Visual, projects like this are about supporting the places that give a community its identity and helping those places tell their stories in a way that will last. Pete’s Bar is a true Florida original, and it is an honor to contribute to its visual history.

If you are interested in branding, illustration, or merchandise development for your own business or event, get in touch.