Factoryroad: A Shop of Industrious Creatives

Exactly ten years ago we opened our shop, Factoryroad.

Working prototype for the FR shop site. This wasn't all of the artists.

Possibly ahead of its time, it was named for the street we live and work on — known, as the name suggests, for its rows of factories, humming away all day and sometimes into the night with a half day on Friday. Channelling the industrious, round-the-clock nature of working, the building we still live and work in — Factoryroad’s base — was built by one of the factory owners for himself, with the foreman’s house built next door, and we still look out from our studio every day at the Victorian factory behind us (now flats, of course).

I’m thinking about the Factoryroad Shop today not only because I’ve just noticed it’s ten years since its launch, but because had its roots in the collaborative, spontaneous, risk-taking way of working that we’ve always fostered, and which we’ve struggled to get back to after a hammering by the isolation and hesitancy of the pandemic. It’s coming back, but our shop represented an energetic pulling-together of friends and colleagues who all made and designed lovely things, and whose work we wanted to sell alongside our own in one place — the site itself was commissioned from an ex-student and creative colleague, Nathan at Smile, then a new company.

From robustly working-class backgrounds, and living with a strong sense of purposeful industriousness, both of us channelled usefulness and productivity in all that we did. You can see it in the design of the site, based on a found invoice from a real factory, hand-drawn rubber stamps included. For us Commerce + Art was never, and still isn’t, a dirty combination, and we embraced the idea of giving a leg-up to our creative mates who made beautiful things.

Factoryroad itself as an entity had existed since the late 90s, making T shirts, 45rpm record adapters, doing record distribution and and making records under our label Blunt Force Trauma — it even had a Tumblr!

From our lovely Tumblr, still there today.

A natural follow-up to a lifetime together putting on music, social and creative events in clubs, empty and unorthodox spaces, we’d done promotion the long-hand way — going out, driving miles to see people in person, make friends and connections, taking pressies and enthusiasm. To network, you had to travel, and travel we did, in our series of odd little cars.

And the thing about FR is that we did it all, everything, without funding. No arts council money, no grants, no awards. Not that we didn’t try a few times — we were just never eligible, or the hoops to jump through were creatively restricting, or we didn’t move in the right circles. So we gave up on that fairly quickly. More correctly, we funded everything ourselves, sometimes putting the household in a precarious position. We didn’t come from money and neither of us had any - only what we earned at the time from freelance illustration, a little part time lecturing and Leigh’s job at the time in a series of record shops — which he proactively decided to leave behind in 2007 — and we were paying a mortgage and studio rent. So we took what with hindsight were huge risks, gambling sometimes thousands on ambitious projects that we never sure would pay us back. But they did pay us back — always in ways we couldn’t predict, and always slowly, but surely.

Nowadays, I see the ease with which Crowdfunding or Kickstarting is deployed — and good for you, if you can do a nice job of that; there’s something terribly appealing about being answerable to a hundred strangers who’ve given you money. I’ve funded plenty of those projects myself, but we never felt comfortable risking anyone’s money but our own!

I still don‘t know who this girl was! If you’re her, let me know.

Getting someone to wear your T while DJing was a superb free promotional method!

Gifting our wares!

To this day, our manifesto remains:

“Our projects are usually created and executed together, and are usually things we want to try out, do for the sake of doing, or experiment with. They’re neither designed to make money (though they sometimes do), nor to satisfy any brief but our own. They’re also, sometimes, collaborative, and are almost always for the entertainment and engagement of other people.”

You can still read this at the top of my Special Projects page, which attempts to gather as many of these together as possible, though there are too many to list (and many, though it seems improbable, are ‘pre-internet’, with no traces online to link to).

As well as a shop, Factoryroad was also a gallery that held myriad events in its space, and was supported by a network of creative friends from a mile away to 5000 miles away — they attended in person, contributed work to shows, and spread the word. Every event was a huge undertaking, and you can read about some of those shows and events here.

We even ran a radio station from there, Altar Ego — itself an incredibly challenging project, even for two ex-pirate radio people, which we weren’t sure we could pull off till we’d, erm, pulled it off…several times.

“Go ahead and chew everything that you’ve just bitten off, Sarah”.

Instructions for using Altar Ego Radio’s mixer. Oof. Sounds like a bollocking.

Doubling up as our working studio space, the gallery space itself eventually became too disruptive and energy-consuming amid the mad amount of client work and other commitments happening at the time, so we pressed pause on it. (We just do things now without disassembling the entire studio for a week.)

Painting scrap cars, because we can! And *not* inside our office space.

The Factoryroad shop was a commitment to our friends and colleagues to provide a platform to sell their work, which most didn’t have at the time. We built it to offer a selling space to some of the people we’d worked with the most, at a point in time when it was far less easy to jump online and set up a payment system and a shop. But it was also a time when was Instagram wasn’t as massive, Etsy wasn’t the big thing it is now, accounting and book-keeping was still a little on the time-consuming side, cheques could still be written, and the avenues for selling were fewer.

Even just ten years ago, promoting, in other words, was harder, but we had the audience and mailing list to make it work.

Some of the artists involved eventually moved away from their creative practice, or lost interest in selling products, and our shop, though beautiful, wasn’t live for long. It might have existed for longer had it been set up today where, a mere ten years later, selling your art online is not just an nice added extra, it’s pretty much mandatory for any artist.

In the end Factoryroad evolved into four separate shops — the busy one I run now, a Discogs shop for records, a smaller shop just for our 45rpm adapters, and a new one for our other business, Inkymole’s Motors, designing and selling automotive accessories and parts. But I look back at all the FR stuff today — stuff it’s impossible to do justice to in one brief article — with fondess and gratitude that we crammed them in, and took those risks, feeling the roots of it all underpinning everything we still do, and tuning into the gentle tapping of my foot as I feel the same urge to ‘get cracking’ again — but with the added perspective, experience and wisdom of someone a few years further along.

For the curious, here’s some of Factoryroad’s collaborators, who either took part in projects or shows, were the star of a show or film or collaborated in some other way — music, film, art, sound or video recording, food, admin. Most are still creatively active, though not necessarily in the same at form. 
In no particular order:

Melanie Tomlinson (metal sculptor, jeweller)
Strictly Kev / DJ Food (designer, recording artist, DJ)
Henry Flint (2000AD comic artist, illustrator)
Buddy Wakefield (spoken word poet, author, performer)
Dick Hogg (prints and artwork)
Peter Horridge (illustrator, designer, typographer)
Aaron Lloyd Barr (was illustrator, then agent, now co-owner of ATRBUTE)
Max Ellis (illustrator and photographer)
Anthony St James (photographer)
Ed Garland (author and musician)
Sage Francis (rapper, hip-hop artist, label owner, musician)
Buddy Peace (hugely prolific musician and producer)
B.Dolan (musician, producer, rapper, activist)
Gareth Edwards (screenwriter, film director)
Louisa St Pierre (illustration agent)
Jed Smith (chef)
Alisha Miller (public artist)
Jonathan Levine (gallery owner)
Andrea Gibson (spoken word poet, author)
Anne Coleman (textile artist)
April Ball (designer)
Beth Robinson’s Strange Dolls (dollmaker and artist)
Caroline Allen (sculptor, artist)
Drew Jerrison (author, now senior marketer in publishing)
Florence EMA Blanchard (artist)
Andrew Bannecker (illustrator)
Nomoco (illustrator)
Stan Chow (illustrator, DJ)
Joe Rogers (artist)
Alan Titmash aka Jonathan Pelham (musician, now art director)
Graham Robson (illustrator, now a senior artist at Games Workshop)
The Cloud Commission (prints and original artwork)
Solo One (original artwork and stickers)
Dick Hogg (prints and artwork)
Tom Hare (woven sculptures and vessels)
Jacquie O’Neill (illustrator)
Jill Calder (illustrator)
Kelly Merrell (doodler)
Lisa Hayes (jewellery)
Rebecca Lupton (photographer)
Shirley Gibson (designer)
Nigel Axon (architect)

Sarah J Coleman (illustration, prints, stationery)
Factoryroad itself (music ephemera, T shirts, 45rpm adapters)

Linkless But Nonetheless Participating People:
Lisa Hayes (jewellery)
Tracy Walker (artist)
Brook Valentine Menown (assistant)
Lily Blythe (assistant)
Rebecca Lewis (artist management)
Bob Neely (music)

The Last Lie

A new book is out in hardback on August 1st - the follow up to Patricia Forde’s ‘The List’ (published also as ‘The Wordsmith’) which I illustrated a couple of years ago.

This cover was created for Sourcebooks USA, and was made with a combination of large, hand-drawn inky pieces and elements made in Procreate.

 I loved putting it together this way - for me, tools are tools, and I get as much out of slopping inks onto a big sheet of paper as I do creating worlds within Procreate, which I still feel like a novice with, but I’m getting there!

What Goes Up

Out today is this book by Christine Heppermann, for which I made this cover using just ink on paper for Greenwillow Books, USA.

This is a YA story told in prose, an unusual format which lends the book a slightly magical, wistful atmosphere, despite dealing with some heavy topics - secrets, regret, mistakes, break-ups. And the narrator is a teenage spore print collector - which, yes, had me bungee-jumping into an online search too.

Unusually, although I suggested seven or eight different roughs, this cover went to press almost completely unaltered from the rough that was chosen. Always a lovely thing to happen! Made with ink and pencil.

LIFT; DOWN.

I wrote about my 26 year relationship recently with my local gym, John’s Gym as it was then, now known as Empire Fitness, in my blog ‘Two Habits’.

I’ve been going to this gym for more than half my life, and it feels like a second home. Over the years it’s had many logos, and looks, and changed names of course, but it’s been Joe’s gym rather than John’s for almost two years now, so when it was forced into closure by The C That Shall Not Be Named, it was an excellent chance to rebrand.

Owner Joe seized on the notion of several weeks (we didn’t know it would actually be months) of closed doors to reorganise the rooms, build new spaces, clear out old kit and invest in new. He's hung new lights, got little electrical jobs sorted, reconfigured the reception and catering spaces, re-thought the pathways through the various workout areas, grouped kit together in ways that make more sense, repainted, and installed all the necessary new distancing and health and safety measures.

I’d always wanted to rebrand the gym. The existing logo of a roaring lion, though I could always see its intention, never really felt like a good fit for the area’s largest and most down to earth gym, set up over 30 years ago for those serious about lifting heavy lumps of iron. Though it’s always had cardio spaces and, eventually, classes, coffee, saunas and a supplements area, it was always the gym for people who are less interested in lycra selfies and Instagram and more focussed on the grunt and face-contortion of Heavy Lifting and Doing The Work. With personal training and advice on tap, should you want it. It’s a no-nonsense, businesslike, inclusive space for all genders, shapes and sizes, housed poetically in the building of one of Hinckley's many old hosiery manufacturers. 

Set in the epicentre of the Druid Quarter, you could in fact say it's a proper fitness factory - you're there to work! - and no-one will try and sell you a subscription or a discounted T shirt with an 'inspirational' quote on it as you walk in the door (though you can get a nice free coffee after your workout).

We think (though are not 100% sure) that Puffer's Factory became the home of Empire Fitness. We think this because the iron columns and the shape and styling of the windows match exactly. The Druid Quarter, in which we live, had a great many factories like this!

So setting aside that little advert for the gym itself, when Joe asked me to create the logo I immediately felt the weight of pressure; the kind of pressure I put on myself when I’ve wanted to do a job so much I’ve freaked myself out when it actually comes to doing it. It’s the kind of specific pressure I feel when a friend or family member asks me to do something. After all, I knew this gym inside and out - was I too close to the subject to do it justice?

I originally wanted a particular, non-verbal logo  which I'd been visualising for weeks, taking the emphasis off the word ‘Empire’, which the owner wanted to keep. I've not shown it here, but try as I might I couldn’t make that route work, so had to set back and re-think.

Though I did really like this one with its prominent weight belt and sneaky kettle bell (sketch + Procreate work-up):

A lettered solution in the end was the answer. I played with calligraphic, spiky letters, a little bit on the Goth/metal side, which would work as just a simple 'E' too:

These weren't popular with anybody except me, but these ones, taking inspiration from the dumbell-wielding strongmen of old, the big top of the circus and the flex and stretch of muscles themselves, were.

Not a font or even derived from one, the letters were hand-drawn one at a time (sketch + Procreate work-up again):

Originally it was suggested with what was going to be a multi-purpose dumbell-holding hand in the centre over the top. However, a fist of triumph at finally deadlifting your own bodyweight, or defeating the grappler, or losing that final half stone, is still a fist, and with all its attendant suggestions of power, rage, protest or politics, we decided to leave it out.

Drawn in Illustrator from the original sketch, here’s the final:

The final logo is clean and robust and I’ve since painted it as large as possible on the reception wall, and is gradually being rolled out across their stationery, website and gear. It will eventually go on the outside of the gym too - but that’s for down the line!

Previous wall and mural work includes this one for Hilton's Canopy Hotel chain in the US - during which we worked for a week in Baltimore city centre, having been flown 3000 miles at ten days' notice and just a week to design the piece, which was still being finished on the plane and in the client's office on arrival.

You can also see the largest piece we've ever done, on retail design kings' Briggs Hiller's wall - a 15m mural created in the studio but painted on a scaffold in a half-finished building with no power. Generators and bags of chips ahoy!

Seven Stories, aka The National Centre for Children's Books, in Newcastle, asked us to paint a wall piece in their café too - for which we lived in the next-door B&B and drank exquisite coffee from the roastery across the rover.

Finally, if you fancy viewing something more local, we designed and painted the brand new logo for the re-opened Bounty pub in Hinckley, as well as gilded details for the interior.

As you can see - we like to paint on walls!