Why merch and why now?
To be honest, doing Poe & Tilly merch was never on my radar. Not until recently. I became Cumberland Council’s Library Ambassador a few months ago and I have been doing library events at a time of year when I’m normally tucked away in my office writing. And what I noticed was that for the first time, fans of the Poe and Tilly series have been seeking out merch and not being able to find it, have been designing their own. T-shirts usually, but we have seen mugs and keyrings, even earrings. Obviously, there was no consistency as everyone was pretty much doing what they wanted. Some designs were great, really inventive, others not so much. This started to happen around the same time that we were getting a lot of emails, social media comments etc, about why we didn’t have merch to buy. So, it felt that now was the right time to do this. But only if we could do it right.
Why a collaboration?
I’m an author. My skillset is not in getting something like this off the ground. And because the Washington Poe and Tilly Bradshaw series has now been translated into (at last count) thirty-one languages, we needed a model that would allow international readers to access the same things readers in the UK could access. A collaboration with the Untamed Chapter made perfect sense. Not only is it a literary merch store that is used to working with authors, they have a faultless reputation and importantly, they ship globally. When we met with them, everything just felt right.
Why choose the Poe & Bradshaw & Flynn & Doyle as your first product range?
This minimalist design – Helvetica typography stacked in a list – was created by the Dutch studio Experimental Jetset in 2001. Their now iconic John & Paul & Ringo & George design, given free to the world, has now inspired thousands of copies, from high profile television commercials like the one McDonalds ran during the Academy Awards, to presidential campaign t-shirts for Barak Obamas. The design works because if you don’t know the names, it will seem a meaningless list of random names, but when fans spot it, their brains automatically connect the dots, creating a sense of shared community. An intellectual award for the wearer and the viewer. I thought this was perfect for the Poe and Tilly series. Our very own IYKYK connection. And trust me, we had long meetings trying to get the list down to just four names. Poe & Bradshaw were easy, of course, but others in serious contention were Bertie & Towler & Locke & Edgar & Rumble . . . And if I speak to ten readers today, they’ll no doubt have a stacked list with four different names tomorrow.
Is this going to be the only design?
If the demand is there, probably not. We may consider another stacked list, we might look at some book specific designs, we might even take the plunge and get someone to have a bash at drawing Poe & Bradshaw & Flynn & Doyle. Maybe even Edgar. Although I think Bugger Rumble might be a step too far . . .
Explore M. W. Craven’s first official Poe and Tilly collection, created in collaboration with The Untamed Chapter.
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