About
Our story
Hello! We are a design studio and independent stationery company producing a range of stylish, clever and playful greetings cards, paper goods and prints in the Yorkshire Wolds, UK.
The brand started on a very small scale in 2005 with Alison’s love of illustrating, making and printing small editions for artists book fairs and markets. With a degree and a masters in Illustration under her belt Alison was not going to let her dreams of being creative for a living go.
Fast forward a few years and we’re now a design studio in Alison’s garden in the Yorkshire hills. Alison gets to do this design thing for a living and loves every minute of it.
Influences and inspirations are wide and varied but mainly come from a huge passion for words, typography, graphic imagery and pattern, illustration and communication of thoughts and notions. We design simple things we would like to receive, own and use.
Central design themes include adventure and exploration, pattern in the everyday, journeys and juxtaposition of colours. Colour is one of the most important and influential parts of our designs. Alison can pore over colours and colour charts for a very long time indeed and we like to think it shows as we’re very proud of our unique and exciting colour palette of designs gathered over the years.
Alison’s vision: to design striking products with true meaning and genuine creative integrity to be used for everyday adventures, monumental occasions and for the love of good design.
Our team:
We’re a small but perfectly formed team of designer, studio assistants and graphic designer.
- Alison (designer who loves a good excuse to put the kettle on) – Often found in a gallery making her children look at art…
- Rachel (studio assistant) – Loves nothing better than escaping into the Yorkshire hills on foot…!
- Angela – Freelance graphic designer and catalogue designer extraordinaire
Our process
We take great pride in our hands-on process and all designs are created by Alison and start with pen, paper, ink, brush and scalpel. The resulting unique style complete with it’s beautiful irregularities combines hand rendered illustrations and type with a clean bold colour palette and a touch of humour. We like to make people smile and think and we love our designs to show that they’ve been created by hand.
Our products
We pride ourselves on keeping production UK based using high quality printers and then all products are lovingly finished, packed and despatched from our studio. Prints are all hand silk screen printed by Alison in our print studio.
All card, envelopes and paper stock are FSC accredited and we use vegetable based inks.
Environment
Any small amount of waste incurred from our small business is recycled locally or reused by ourselves. We re-use packaging where possible and have a small carbon footprint by using local businesses and services where possible.
Our Stockists & Trade Partners
Over the years since we started trading we’ve built up an array of stockists from around the UK, Channel Islands, Europe and the world. Our stockists are very important and fundamental to our business and we are very proud of the honest and personable way in which we conduct our business which has resulted in a great deal of friendships with buyers and shop owners!
Alison has built up and maintained some very loyal and long-standing stockists and our retailers list now includes prestigious stores, galleries and independent shops across the UK and abroad with distribution in place for Australia and Canada. See the stockists page to find a stockist near you. Please contact us with any questions regarding our products.