CALLIGRAPHUCK - HOW TO FOLLOW YOUR CREATIVE DREAMS

What better way to say 'I love you' than to say 'I fucking love you' in gorgeous twirly writing. 

We stock Calligraphuck cards for this reason. And because we love supporting Australians making their creative outlet their life. 

Linus Boman gives us advice for how to make a living from your creative dreams via his success story.

Founder: Linus Boman 

How the phuck was Calligraphuck born? Give us a story.

Calligraphuck was born out of a love of lettering and swearing.

I had moved back to Brisbane after living in London for a few years and I ended up in a day job where I had a lot of free time. So I started to doodle, and just by nature they ended up mostly being obscene words in fancy writing.

I started sharing these on Instagram and gained a small following. One of my coworkers saw this and asked me to make a birthday card for another colleague and based on the positive feedback from that I started thinking about the idea of making proper greeting cards. I had always loved printing, but could never find the kind of cards that would appeal to my deviant friends that were also well designed.


How did you get the project off the ground?

I wanted to make sure the quality of the cards was top-notch, so I had a look at a lot of different printing techniques. Letterpress really appealed to me because it has this wonderful tactile element – unlike your standard commercial offset printing – the design is literally pressed into the card stock, leaving a deep impression you can feel in your hands. It was also perfectly suited to lettering-based designs.

So after finding the right printers, I set up a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo. I set out to raise $5000 to print 4 designs, produce bespoke envelopes and cover worldwide shipping for all the pre-orders.

Luckily, one of the hundreds of blogs I emailed was a pretty high-profile blog in the States which gave us some good exposure, and after that the campaign really took off. In the end it raised more than twice the original goal, and so I had the budget to produce 8 greeting card designs and things have been growing ever since

Was it easier or harder than expected to get Calligraphuck off the ground? What has been your biggest challenge?

A mix of both. I expected it would be hard work. For the first 6 months I packed and sent all the orders myself out of my bedroom (including the crowd-funding campaign, the first Christmas and Valentine's) – having a warehouse has made life a lot more manageable, but finding somewhere that had a pricing structure that made sense for our business took time.

I say "our" because since then my brother Ben has joined me. We're still a small family business. I think our biggest challenge is still ahead. We've been very lucky in that a lot of people love the designs I do, but we're still learning a lot about the business side. International shipping has been a big pain. I moved back to London but a lot of our customers are outside the UK. We'd ideally like to have a US warehouse too but we haven't found anywhere with a price structure similar to what we have in the UK.

Calligraphuck cards at Passionfruit

What does your daily routine look like? Are you spending all your time time now designing and swearing?

It varies, but definitely more now than ever. Now Ben handles the orders so I can focus on the design, but when people email through the website it ends up in my inbox. We're really focussing on expanding the range of designs this year, so that we'll be able to start going to trade shows and more next year.

When I'm working on a design it usually takes about 6–8 hours of work from sketch to artwork to be sent to press. All the lettering is sketched by hand first, then brought into the computer and redrawn in Adobe Illustrator.

Of course there are other things that need time too, like promotion, keeping up relationships with our wonderful resellers (like Passionfruit!), social media (I try to upload at least one original sketch a week) and we have some new offerings coming out in March through Chronicle Books, so things are pretty busy!

For the moment, I still need to take on additional design work too, as the business is only 18 months old and isn't big enough to support us on its own yet. But we hope that it will continue to grow and one day that won't be the case!

Any advice for those with creative business ambitions?

I'd definitely encourage anyone who has an idea to start their own creative business to give it a go. I've been constantly surprised by the interest people have shown in my funny little idea, which goes to show, you're probably not the best person to estimate how successful your own idea could be!

I highly recommend crowd-funding as a great way to get an idea off the ground, and a great way to gauge interest at the same time! Platforms like Indiegogo, Kickstarter and Pozible really can work. Make sure you put the work into it though. 

Make spreadsheets. Work out your costs (make sure you factor in international shipping!). 

Make a list of blogs, people on twitter, friends and family who might be interested and contact them about your project, no matter how self-conscious you might feel about self promoting. You might be surprised by how many people are interested!