It’s our birthday again! And as we do every year, we’ve found ourselves looking back—not at the numbers, not at the milestones, but at the people who have grown alongside us.
This year, our thoughts keep returning to Niki Usagi. She came to London from Budapest, found her way to Camberwell for an MA in Illustration, and graduated in 2024. Today she runs her own line of greeting cards and paper goods, takes on editorial commissions, sets up her stall at markets around the country, and since September, has been doing all of it full time. She describes it as “a very full-on operation”. We’d call it the very thing we hoped would happen to all our makers when we opened our doors.
It began with a card
Niki first crossed our path during her MA, when she entered our card competition with Tate. She won! Her design was printed, stocked, and sold at Tate—her first product on a shelf, and a moment she still speaks with pride.
But the moment that truly stayed with her was softer than that. Her family came to visit and saw her work in not just a shop, and something shifted.
“Finally they could see,” she says. “It was a big moment for me to communicate that this is the direction I’m going in—that it’s not just a hobby.”
A first product, it turns out, is rarely only about the product.
The people who believed first
Ask Niki what she remembers most about working with us, and she doesn’t mention the commissions. She mentions the team: Nat Stevens, Oliver Fairhurst, and Clio Delcour-Min. The afternoons spent on window designs, the mural at our Stratford shop, the feedback that was always honest and always generous.
“They’re just amazing,” she says. “I get a lot of love and really good feedback. It’s always really charging.”
It was Clio who kept gently urging her towards bigger things— from one-to-one product development sessions, to then Top Drawer. After Niki’s Tate poster competition panellist experience, Clio pushed for Niki to take part in Top Drawer, which proved to be a turning point. It resulted in 3 days of orders; a chance meeting with her current publisher, who now prints her products and delivers them to retailers; and a proper education in what wholesale really means.
“That was what started the whole retail craze,” she says. “Without it, I couldn’t have understood the background of this business.”
This is why we do this
What we try to offer the makers we work with isn’t only encouragement. It’s the necessary support that helps a practice take root—the commissions that build confidence, the product development sessions that turn an idea into a range, the honest conversations about pricing and packaging, the nudge towards an opportunity you might not have seen for yourself.
As we celebrate 9 years, stories like Niki’s are at the heart of everything we do. We are not just a shop. We are a community. Every product on our shelves represents a dream nurtured, a talent supported, and a story still being written. It is our greatest privilege to play a part in these journeys.
To our customers: thank you for buying into these dreams and helping us write the next chapter. To our students and graduates: your ambition is why we exist. We can’t wait to see what you create, and we are always here to help you build it.