Inside the Wonderfully Eccentric World of Archivist’s William Allardice
We’ve met once at an exhibition and it seems you have a reputation for a questionable dress sense? Unfortunately, I have heard some of my outfits described as ‘chaotically colourful’. I try my best to channel my inner David Hockney but sometimes I ignore the importance of restraint when it comes to achieving sartorial elegance, but I will keep on trying!
How did Archivist come into being? Like many ideas the start point of our journey was a long way from where we have ended up. The previous 12 months to the company’s birth saw me, unsuccessfully, try to sell racehorses to Japan, I call that period my lost year. But a much more useful grounding had been spent working for Wedgwood, both in the UK and in Japan. In hindsight these were history defining years for the UK pottery industry as all the giant tableware manufacturers were deaf and blind to the huge social changes that were happening; trends that would result in mass-produced formal dinner services becoming all but redundant. This experience hopefully sharpened my antennae to make sure that we listen hard to the outside world and be aware of trends that could affect us. Two very happy years on the factory floor in Stoke-on-Trent also ingrained in me a love and respect for the handmade process – letterpress printing and the potters wheel aren’t too far apart from each other.
So, what was the inspiration for the company? Aside from the disastrous racehorse escapade the experience of retail was always my passion. My daily commute in the 1980’s took me past the amazingly creative windows of Harvey Nichols. This was the period when Mary Portas headed up their display team and art critics would compare the window displays favourably to anything seen in the Tate Gallery. Retail when done well is theatre and I was hooked!
Sarah, my wife and co-founder who I met during my ‘lost year’, had the clever idea to ignore my questionable qualifications and to start our own business in the stationery world, a world she knew well concentrating on my enthusiasm for both product design and retail.
Why the name ‘Archivist’? I am tempted to answer ‘it says what it does on the tin’; we started by working closely with such august institutions as the Natural History Museum. Thirty years ago museums were very protective of their collections and curators found the whole idea of letting people into their archives with a commercial vision highly questionable. The inspirational Roy Strong at the V&A and the subsequent need for museums to raise funds has resulted in them now being totally open to joint ventures, but at the time we were definitely innovators. By championing good design we were able to win over sceptical museum staff and Archivist had established itself as a ‘go to’ brand in the heritage sector.
The frustrated potter in me also wanted to get my hands dirty and ‘lady luck’ came to the rescue when we were introduced to two wildly eccentric letterpress printers. I was smitten by the process and still young and foolish I bought our first Heidelberg platen printing press. Trial and error and very long days in the printing shed eventually saw me competent enough to launch our first letterpress collection. Happily, this was well received and though I have now hung up my printing apron I have been left with an unshakeable love for letterpress and admiration for the skilled printers at our own press and studio.
How does letterpress impact the style of Archivist? The gorgeous simplicity of the process, where the ink is applied one block colour at a time, demands that the design is quite constrained and as a result the artist needs a real clarity of vision. The technique forces you to aim for simplicity and that, we believe, is its great strength. You can’t talk about letterpress without also mentioning the end tactility of the finished piece too, there’s no process like it.
So how did the matchbox come about? Our attic is home to various childhood collections, one of which was an old and limited collection of matchbox labels which became used as inspiration for some of our stationery designs. An idea was then born to reproduce some actual matchboxes. Amazingly, the idea worked and it reignited a passion for collecting labels. I can now claim to be a genuine phillumenist as we are the main sponsor of the UK Matchbox Collectors Guild!
Andy Warhol’s famous reproductions of Campbell Soup tins elevated good packaging to be seen as ‘artworks’ in their own right. Having been lucky enough to see some of the world’s finest matchbox label collections we believe that no other product charts the history and trends of global design than the humble matchbox, much more so than a soup tin!
The company is now almost 30 years old and you still seem to be much loved by your customers. Is there a secret? It’s now quite a long time ago that it was just Sarah and me sitting around the kitchen table making all the decisions. We have been very fortunate to have been joined by several highly creative people who are as passionate about design and retail as we are. We also collaborate with a growing community of printmakers, screenprinters, typographers and fellow ink lovers. We hope that these new designs elevate Archivist to being seen as a gallery where everything we make is collectable and perhaps worthy of a place in the museums of the future.
We are also only too delighted to work with brands that have a similar ethos as ourselves: Merci, Conran, Daylesford, Blumenhaus and The Newt are just some recent partners that we have loved working with. The list is a long and ever-growing!
So as the founder what is your roll? Rather sweetly the team still defer to Sarah and me on important design issues and we still operate the “Mantlepiece Test” for all new launches, checking to see if the designs after two weeks still bring a smile to us, if not they head for the recycling bin.
I’m also still allowed to design our tradeshow stands; perhaps at heart I’m a frustrated architect but it gives me an opportunity to see if I would have had the talent to be a Harvey Nichols window dresser!
