Over the first three years of our acquaintance, we got to know each other by long distance correspondence. We wrote each other long letters over the course of days, and made mix tapes with custom covers, which are now sadly lost.
Now we live together in East London. We decided to make stationery as a vocation. We like the tradition of getting something nice through the letterbox. And we wanted to make stuff that people can purchase and collect inexpensively. So now we make greeting cards and our annual wall calendar and also a notebook and then ephemera like badges and prints and stuff. We named our company after our surnames, with the hope that people would use it one day as an adjective.
In order to foster narratives of correspondence, we invented six characters. We couldn't decide on how to draw their faces, so we decided they were too shy to show their faces. It was kind of the opposite of an instantly recognizable face like Hello Kitty's or Charlie Brown's, even though we are inspired by both of those characters, especially the latter.
The narratives have always remained elliptical. Hints and clues appear and reappear here and there throughout our products. And over time, rendering the characters became secondary to illustrating their points of view, the things they collect and the worlds they imagine. Really, it's just a conduit for our own interests: Maps, paperbacks, old movies, radio broadcasts, found objects, secret histories, long walks, weeds and wildflowers, magpies, foxes, badgers, art supplies, nautical things, council estates, trees, trains and pebbles.
At first we wondered if our cards were a little too odd, or melancholic. They are different from happy birthday cards. But people seem to like them, especially the odd and melancholic ones, so we keep making more.
The things we make are soft, and we're ok with that. We've used watercolour from the start. When we began making this stuff, some people thought we were uncool. One shopkeeper told us, "well, cool, but not my kind of cool." She still doesn't sell our things but they are available in some fine museum shops and bookstores and boutiques, so it's fine. It takes all kinds.
We sometimes make things such as advertisements for bands or invitations to weddings. Also we helped our friends select colours to paint their walls and sometimes we just put up blog entries about books we like and stuff. Basically, we try to make small contributions where it seems appropriate.
Please let us know if you'd like to talk at all, or have anything you'd like to ask us. We'll be sure to get in touch.