About
Weirdo & Co
We draw odd objects, model them, print them in Australia, and finish them by hand. Then we retire them. Every design gets a number of its own, and we keep printing it for as long as we are making it. Once we stop, the number retires with the design and is never given to anything else.
Why odd things
Most of what you can buy for a shelf is designed not to be noticed. It matches the couch, it behaves itself, and it fills a space that a plant would have filled just as well.
The things worth having are the ones people pick up. Something with a face that is doing slightly too much. A specimen that will not explain itself. A vase that is really an argument about shadows, and a lamp with opinions about the room it is in.
None of it is useful. That is rather the point. An object with no job has to earn its place by being interesting, which is a considerably harder brief than being a bowl.
Five ranges, one workshop
The Weirdos are creatures: they have names, they have numbers, and they are made to be adopted. The Visitors are specimens, catalogued and filed with a straight face, and nothing in them was ever alive. The Keepers are vases that do something interesting with a low sun. The Beacons are lamps that run off a USB port. The Neighbours live on your bookshelf, in the gap or at the end of the row.
They look nothing like each other on purpose. What holds them together is the numbering: one book, one sequence, and no number ever issued twice.
Made about four metres from here
Everything is drawn, modelled, printed, painted and packed in the same room. Nobody signs anything off. Nothing is focus-grouped, and no decision has ever been improved by asking a committee whether a dragon should be purple.
Some of it will not sell. We make it anyway, because the alternative is making the vase that matches the couch.
What we will always tell you
That the plastic is made from plants but will not compost. That nothing in a specimen jar was ever alive. That a hand-painted thing will not match its photograph exactly. That a display piece is not a toy.
None of that is difficult to say, and most shops selling this sort of thing would rather not. We would rather you knew, and then bought it anyway.