Starting Gnarly Head Toys

Alex and Jon at work in the studio

Getting serious about something that you do as a hobby is a big deal with the emphasis on serious. But sometimes you have to make steps like this to move from something that is a bit of a hobby to doing it for real.

Both Alex and myself have long been interested in toys and collecting. It is only in the last year or two that I started getting interested in making my own toys. This was in part due to my frustration with toylines not existing and deciding to make my own toys for those lines for myself. I already had skills in 3D and sculpting so it was not a huge jump to appyling that to this vocation. After a lot of back and forth with Alex and our shared love of Japanese toys, we thought we would try to and create our own Sofubi base on our own designs and ideas.

We decided to look around for a space that was relatively affordable that we could use to collabrate in. There are a number of studio spaces in Derby that you can rent, but none of these fitted what we really needed. Either the cost was too much, it lacked the facilities we needed or the hours we could use the studio was too restrictive.

I didn’t really consider Banks Mill Studios at all, thinking it was just for recent graduates from the University of Derby. But we found it that we were wrong about that and in fact it was the perfect space for us to develop and grow, providing valuable incubation and support, as well asa strong Art community sharing the building. Before we knew it we were putting in a bid for a studio space that we could share. Putting together an application with a business plan was daunting, but Abi and Karen who run the day to day running of the studios were great at helping us through it and providign much needed advice.

So now it is all serious, now we have a space, it is REAL and now we need to start PRODUCING. We have the open studios taking place in November which is where all the studios will showcase and sell content. This is our first real deadline to make some progress and generate interest in our toy making. Its exciting and scary at the same time, but this is how life should be. Life is a series of chapters and we are both at our next chapter. Lets hope its a good and GNARLY one……