We have been working with children's book writer and illustrator Daisy Hirst for quite a few years now. Her characters have been really popular with many of our customers, young and old alike. In close collaboration with Daisy, we went through a good few product development ideas and finalised on a collection of tote bags, t-shirts and sweatshirts.
Newt tote in turquoise
Some of the products took quite a lot of development. The overlays for the two colour prints (cats and newts) proved to be quite difficult to get spot on! The printing problems this caused meant that these weren't very cost effective to produce. We did, however, release these in tote bags.
Crocodile Stands t-shirt in daisy yellow
During lockdown we had a sample sale of some of our test prints. This was incredibly successful and showed that we were on the right lines with this project, and that people did indeed want to wear Daisy's character designs!
Big pile of sample totes
Sample t-shirts with a very tricky newt on top
Unfortunately during one of the lockdowns, our shared commercial print studio was closed which meant that the more complicated two colour designs were too troublesome to outsource to screen printers as we were now unable to print in-house. Fortunately at this point we had printed a first run of t-shirts, a lot of samples, and a lot of tote bags, so could use a very talented (fairly) local printer who was one of the previous occupants of our studio. We went with Georgina Hardy at Screen23 in The Forest of Dean who I would highly recommend.
Crocodile Stands sweatshirt in grey heather
We currently have cats, newts, dogs in berets and crocodile designs in tote bags, printed on several different colours and in a few colorways; t-shirts printed in two crocodiles and dogs in berets in black print on multiple coloured cotton; and in sweatshirts we have the dogs and crocodiles in black print on several colorways.
Cat tote in pink colorway