Hungry Workshop
As part of The Other Name Project, we met with Jenna Hipgrave from Hungry Workshop to discuss their brand, their values, their attention to detail and their hunger for new and exciting adventures.
Print collateral isn’t dead, it’s just changing from what used to be quantity, to now a focus on quality.
Dani Sampson:
So, tell us about how Hungry Workshop came into being, what’s the back story, how it all happened?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The Hungry Workshop started nine years ago. My husband Simon, who was my fiancé then, and I started going up to this little historical village, outside of Brisbane.
It was a Ye Olde print shop, and it had all these presses. It was full of dust, and dirt, and metal type, and just bits and pieces, everything from the printing industry. Tins of dried up ink, and all sorts of weird stuff. So we would go up there, and the guys that were volunteering to run it were retired printers. They just wanted to pass on their knowledge, and have people be passionate and share it.
We started with hand-set business cards. It would be a tiny little line of type, and it would take four Wednesdays to set it up, and then we would print it. We printed on one of the presses like this, it was hand fed and foot treadled. And the rule was you couldn’t talk to anyone while you were doing it, you really had to be in your little zone of printing because the printers could smash your fingers, or your feet.
Then Simon discovered the Heidelberg Windmills, which are the bigger production presses that we have. They’re more mechanical and they can print bigger runs of things, so we can do a run of thousands, rather than 10.
Then we got engaged, and we printed our wedding invitations. It felt like every graphic designer’s dream, to letterpress print their own wedding invitations. One day they offered us an old printing press that wasn’t being used. We came home and said “Oh no, we can’t… we live in a two bedroom apartment, on the second floor. And if we put in a one and a half tonne machine, it would drop through the floor.”
We thought about it, and then the next day we said, “Well, actually…” So we talked to Simon’s parents, and they let us put it in their basement. This one and a half tonnes of metal. We had to clean it, it was all rusty. And we had to tinker with bits, and get different parts from overseas. We started figuring it out, and then we came up with the name the Hungry Workshop, and went from there.
Dani Sampson:
What was it like having these older teachers passing down such an antique craft?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The retired printers, Bob and Ken, were our mentors. Bob is 81, and started learning letterpress printing when he was a teenager. He went straight from school into an apprenticeship. He had been printing for a lifetime, and he had all these amazing stories of print shops with 50 printing presses and printing newspapers every day. And then once he retired he lost that connection to it, and he’s such a fantastic teacher. They both are, Bob and Ken. And they loved passing on that knowledge to the next generation of printers.
Dani Sampson:
Great. So, then Hungry Workshop was born. What is the name to you guys? What were some of the names that you were throwing around? What was it about that name?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The Hungry Workshop. When we rebranded we dropped the ‘The’, because it just didn’t work with the design. But the name Hungry Workshop came from… we were on our honeymoon. We decided to start the business, and we were trying to think of a name. We really wanted something that had a lot of emotion to it. And we were walking up this little stairway, I remember the specific moment where Simon was like “I know it. The word is Hungry. That’s it”. It speaks to the hunger for design, and the hunger for beautiful work, and the hunger for new and exciting adventures.
And it also works well with the printing presses because they’re beasts. They are inky and we feed them oil, and it kind of drips down. And we feed them paper, and they have this breath. It sounds like they’re breathing when they’re printing, because of the way they close and open. And then the ‘workshop’ side of things, we talked about doing ‘studio’, or ‘industry’ but we thought ‘workshop’ was perfect because it is a workshop. It is inky, and messy, and we are making things, with tools, paper and ink.
Dani Sampson:
Were there any other names you threw around?
Jenna Hipgrave:
I found the sheet a couple of months ago. We had this piece of paper that we were carrying around with us, that had all of our names written on it and it was super funny to look back on. One of the ones that would not have made any sense now was ‘Honey and Eggs’. We had seen this sign that had ‘Honey and Eggs’ on it, and we thought “Oh that’s sweet”. But it was too wedding orientated for what we were doing, so it didn’t work.
Something about being earnest, that was another underlying theme that we were talking about. But again, it didn’t work with the name.
Dani Sampson:
You know, you speak about hungry, you speak about being earnest. What are the other words that you think about when you think about Hungry Workshop?
Jenna Hipgrave:
Well we are constantly rebranding. We worked with Apostrophe, they’re copywriters. Amazing work. We were just struggling, we were so in it, in our heads and they really helped us tease out the key words, of how we felt about the Hungry Workshop and what it meant to us. So, some of the words, earnest, perfectionism was part of it, strength. Strength in the design and strength in the printed piece. Being trustworthy as a brand, but also as designers and other people come to us they need to trust that we will see their vision through. Because it’s a bit of a leap of faith, with letterpress you can only mock something up on the computer and then you have to wait and see what the magic of the presses will do.
Dani Sampson:
What was the vision that you had for Hungry Workshop, in the early days? What were the hopes and the dreams?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The vision for the Hungry Workshop was to always create these beautiful objects. That was what drew us to letterpress printing in the first place. But then also a sense of collaboration with either designers that we print with, or design work that we do, and illustrators. We wanted to be able to have exhibitions, that we could feature illustrators, who’s work we loved. We had an exhibition at the very beginning, when we first started, and we asked 15 artists to join in. And so many of them said yes. We were blown away by that, you can just contact people, and you can work with people.
Dani Sampson:
How does it feel to be really ingrained in a design community of designers that do trust you, and clients that do trust you to create such beautiful things? The things you’ve seen, and the responsibility, how it makes you feel?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The projects that we love working on the most are the ones that we get to collaborate with the designer. They come to us with an idea, and we say “It might work this way, or it might work that way. Let’s test it, let’s get this weird stock, let’s do this weird thing with these plates.” And then end result is this beautiful piece that resonates with the brand or the project.
Dani Sampson:
You’re a part of so many people’s brands and identities. How does that play into what you do, and how you see brands come to life, and see physical manifestations of something they’ve been working so hard on?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We are very lucky in that we get to work with a lot of brands that we love ourselves. And it’s so exciting seeing something that we’ve actually created and worked on, in their café, or shop, or sent out as an invitation. And just to see that life in the physical pieces. So, when you pick up a piece of paper that’s been letterpress printed, it has physicality… you can see them touching it, you can see them interacting with it, and looking at it in the light and the shadows. And there’s so much love and care that has been put into that piece, I think people really sense that in the final outcome.
Dani Sampson:
What was it like going through the branding process and what were the discussions that you and Simon had when you were creating Hungry Workshop?
Jenna Hipgrave:
In the very beginning we wanted to make sure that we were seen as both a letterpress workshop and a design studio. Everyone that works here prints and designs. And that was a really important combination to us, because we feel like there’s so much more benefit having a designer who prints, and a printer who designs. Because you understand both sides. And so, we really wanted to convey that idea, and not have it be a super industrial print shop or simply a design studio.
Dani Sampson:
And how do you think that came through in the branding, your messaging, your conversations?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We are careful with always talking about both things at once. Whether that is in a website description or photography… like our Instagram, we always make sure to include projects and presses. Sometimes it’s the design studio, sometimes it’s the print shop, and sometimes it combines.
Dani Sampson:
So, when you engaged an external agency, as a second stage, once the brand was a little bit more mature, what were the learnings? And why did you think it was time to reach out to someone, to have a look from an external perspective?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We’ve always loved the brand, but the logo itself we were never 100 percent. And we really wanted to work on that. We have so many iterations of it, they are really funny to look back on. They are so embarrassing. And we really wanted to nail the branding, and we just kept getting stuck, it was just too close to us. Simply talking to someone else about it was so helpful, it really helped clarify our brand values.
Dani Sampson:
What were some of the things you learned when you went through a more formal and structured branding process?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We kind of turned the tables on ourselves, and had someone else, a copywriter, ask us questions, and try to tease the brand story out of us. And it was really helpful. Even trying to describe the business and brief someone about it helped us immensely. There was a couple of different tag lines that we were playing with, and some of them didn’t feel quite right. We were trying to describe it, and we came to the realization that they didn’t feel earnest enough, they didn’t feel like us. Because it is so much about us.
Dani Sampson:
What did it feel like, creating a brand that had to embody all of those things? What did it feel like injecting Simon and yourself into the branding process?
Jenna Hipgrave:
There was a lot of pressure on the brand, and on ourselves, to make it right. And now, when I look at our business cards or one of our envelopes, there’s a quietness, it feels right. I can’t describe what that feeling is, but it feels right with your heart. It sounds cheesy. When we were coming up with the taglines with the copywriter, the one they presented was one of the first ones, and the line was “For work that holds weight.” And that weight and that heaviness felt really right, for the presses, and the workshop, and the work that we created. And answered a lot of questions for us. That tag line helped us finish the brand, which we’d been working on for years. And we finally finished the business cards that we love, we love all the work that we’ve done with it.
Dani Sampson:
Does it feel like you finally get to have a clear identity, that you can inject yourself into, fully, at that point? Once you’re like, this is us, this is what we stand for, this is what we believe in. Now, anything we do, anything we create beyond that point, will have consistency, will feel right, will fit into place. All those sorts of things. Is that what you were looking for, when you were trying to create the brand?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We’d always done letterpress and design. And we had started doing a wider range of things, but we really wanted to bring it in, and really focus on the stuff that we really love doing. And having that conversation about our brand… it had been six years by then. Having to really figure it out and write it down for someone else, made us really think about what we wanted to do with the business. And that clarified everything for us.
Dani Sampson:
Amazing, yeah. So, you were talking before about the many iterations you had of the logo. Why was it so important to you and why was it not feeling right?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We’ve been around for nine years, so that’s a long time for a logo to exist. And as designers, we constantly wanted to change it and tweak it, and we were actually holding ourselves back from producing a lot of collateral around our old logo. Even though we were printing all sorts of stuff for different people, we weren’t printing our own things. And that meant, to me at least, that we weren’t entirely happy with the logo. Once we had been working on different versions of the logo, we ended up with a lot of particular specifications. We wanted something that used foil and letterpress. We wanted something that had thin lines and thick lines. So, there were lots of production requirements around it, both to challenge ourselves to print something hard and to show off the work that we did.
Dani Sampson:
What was it like starting a print company in a digital era? Did everyone think you were crazy?
Jenna Hipgrave:
Well, Simon had always wanted to start a design studio together. And I was always “Oh, I’m not quite ready,” as we never had a unique point of difference. And then when the letterpress came into it, that just answered all my questions. It really made a lot of sense to have them both together.
But in terms of printing in the digital world, people are printing less. They’re not printing annual reports anymore, they’re not printing zillions of mail outs, or anything like that. People are printing just business cards, or they’re printing just note cards. Or they’re printing just a beautiful label to go on a bottle. People aren’t printing as much as they used to, so that they can really focus that printing on one beautiful piece. The budgets that used to print hundreds or thousands of things, are now to print a hundred. And that’s letterpress.
Dani Sampson:
And that’s quality. Yeah, it’s letterpress. The answer is letterpress.
Jenna Hipgrave:
Yes.
Dani Sampson:
What problems do you think you solve for your customers? How are you making their lives better?
Jenna Hipgrave:
In terms of the designers, the problems that we can help them solve are production problems. That can be a budget problem. A designer comes to us and says “Our client has $1,000, what can we do with that? What stocks can we use? What production techniques?” Sometimes we combine things. We can print a business card and a with compliments slip together, so we can be creative that way. Designers also come to us with the problem of trying to communicate their vision. The designer has made a mock up, and they really want it to look like this. And we say “Look, it’s not ever going to look like that, it will look like this.” So we show samples, and other things we’ve printed, to make it as close to the designer’s vision and to make sure that everyone’s on the same page, so everyone knows exactly what we’re producing.
Dani Sampson:
Do you think in your marketing collateral, or your branding, or the way that you’ve built the story around your brand, that your messages comes across? In terms of that expertise, that sort of working with the client to help. All the messages that are so important to people when they’re choosing providers, or suppliers.
Jenna Hipgrave:
We try to talk a lot about our process, on Instagram mainly, about how we work with people. We show how we started here, and then we ended up here, and how we worked with the designer or the client to actually get there. So, we try and push that out on social media as much as we can. And then I think it’s also just day by day, client by client, as that word of mouth referral gets around.
Dani Sampson:
So how do you think crafting a strong brand has helped with the success of the business? Do you think it has?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We always try and come back to our core idea. Which is that we’re creators, and we create beautiful objects for other creative people, and makers. So that every object that we send out to the world, that has our own brand on it, we make sure that it really speaks to who the Hungry Workshop is. We have these beautiful little thank you cards that go out with every job that we print. And it says who printed it, and then who packed it. Every job that we print is checked. One of us checks every single business card, front and back, front and back. And then that goes out to the world so that object, that experience of opening the box, we want the client to be able to see the beauty, and the time that was spent creating it.
Dani Sampson:
What were some of the lessons during your branding process? Some things that you didn’t know, anything that was uncovered?
Jenna Hipgrave:
A big part of the branding was the physical side of things. How our physical presence in the world is shown. So, whether it’s signage, or a mural, or even simply a business card. I got this phone call one day, from this Uber driver, and he’s like “Oh, sorry Jenna. I’ve got something of yours, and I’m trying to return it.” And I was like “What is it?” And he’s said “It’s this card. And it’s grey, and it has your name on it, and your phone number, and your email.” And I said “Does it have a logo, and does it say Hungry Workshop?” And he was like “Yeah, yeah, it’s this card.” And I said “That’s my business card, you can keep that if you like. Thank you so much for the call.” He wanted to return my business card. He thought it was such a special thing that he tried to return it.
Dani Sampson:
How has the vision changed over time?
Jenna Hipgrave:
I actually don’t think the vision has changed. I think it’s really true to where we were nine years ago. We are designers and we are printers, and we still love creating these beautiful things. If anything, I feel like it went further afield, and has come back to where it started now.
Dani Sampson:
I suppose it’s that learning process, you’re constantly iterating, right? Then at some point, the penny drops, and you’re like, “This is who we wanted to be all along.” Vision for the future? You said it hasn’t really changed. Will it change?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The vision for the future is to keep pushing boundaries with print. We have designers who we work really closely with coming to us with exciting new ideas. They’re brainstorming as much as we’re brainstorming. We’re not professionally trained printers, we probably do it all wrong. We print slowly, and it takes time. We’ve printed this certain pink colour for Patricia, a coffee shop in the city, and they have this certain pink colour that doesn’t exist in the Pantone book. It doesn’t exist anywhere, but we know what their colour is, because we’ve mixed it so many times to print their business cards. And it’s this beautiful shade of pale pink. And that’s their brand colour. And that’s what we love doing. We love creating these unique things for this brand that no one else can create.
Dani Sampson:
Do you constantly feel like you’re reliving that scene from American Psycho? Where you’re always comparing business cards?
Jenna Hipgrave:
The worst is when you give someone a business card, and they don’t want to give you theirs. They won’t give it to you, because they’re too embarrassed. They’re like “Oh no, I’ll just call you, or email you”. And I say “Come to us, we’ll print you some nice business cards”.
Dani Sampson:
The shame of it.
Jenna Hipgrave:
I know, it is.
Dani Sampson:
It’s alright, being a reasonably new business, I have a disclaimer every time I hand out a business card, I’m like, “These are just test prints, the real ones are coming soon!”
Jenna Hipgrave:
I feel like so many people say that.
Dani Sampson:
Oh God, I know. You guys have become the gold standard. That must feel amazing, right?
Jenna Hipgrave:
There are some beautiful things out there in the world.
Dani Sampson:
How do you get through the hard days? The mistakes?
Jenna Hipgrave:
We’re in the midst of it right now. It seems to come in waves. Sometimes, either we haven’t communicated the right thing to a client, or a designer, and then we try and fix it, so we talk through it in the studio. Are we going to re-print it? Or should we change the production specs? And you just have to keep going. It’s good to remember that we’re not saving lives. We’re not doctors. If someone’s waiting until the next day, it’s going to be fine. Or if someone doesn’t have a business card first thing, there’s always the next event. So, it’s always good to come back to that.
Dani Sampson:
There’s a real sense of warmth and togetherness here. And I think that probably comes with growing a brand alongside the growth of a relationship. What parts of this company, or what parts of the brand are Simon and what parts are you?
Jenna Hipgrave:
One of the reasons we were motivated to start our own business is that Simon was working in advertising. His creative director would go home and put the kids to bed for half an hour, and then come back to work. And we just didn’t want that to be our future. We wanted a business that could be a family business. Us working in it together, and also being really flexible with our time, and with our kids. And everyone else that worked here as well, we want everyone to have a life. It’s really important to not just… everything is not just work. Everything is, it’s bigger than that. And when we moved into this space about eight years ago, we got our dog, Olive.
She would come to the studio with us every day. She was our guard dog and our doorman, and she would bark really loudly when anyone would come by. And so she’s really been as much of the brand, as we are. We have actually joked about printing her business cards. Little ‘Olive the Dog’ business cards. Because everybody wants to know what kind of dog she is.
Simon is way more about the big ideas, with his advertising background. He’s about the big ideas, and the concepts, and the big picture stuff. Whereas I’ve always been about the detail, perfectionism, and the printing side of things. When we first started we would print together. We had to stop doing that, because it was not very time efficient. Simon started to move more into the design side of things, and I was doing more of the print side of things. And it just worked really well, with the two of us having those different skills. That we weren’t trying to compete, they were complementary skills.
Dani Sampson:
Well, they say in a relationship you need to be two wholes, not two halves. And in some ways, it feels like you guys have kept both; that strength of keeping the production side of the business, and the design side of the business, means that you’ve been able to keep your two wholes.
Jenna Hipgrave:
Good call.
Dani Sampson:
And, our final question; is there something that people don’t know about letterpress printing that you want them to know? Is there one thing you’re like, “I’m so damn sick of explaining this”?
Jenna Hipgrave:
I feel like a lot of people don’t know that we hand mix the inks. When you spec a Pantone colour, that is actually made up of three or four other inks, and we have to physically get it out of the tin, and mix it up, and then put it on the press. It takes time to mix an ink. And then to change the ink colour, it takes half an hour to wash the press down, and put another ink on. You can tell when a designer has a real appreciation for colour, it’s such an important part of a project when you only have one or two colours.
