KKUMUL

KKUMUL is a hand-lettering fancy-goods brand I launched. Its handwriting is unpolished on purpose, because handwriting that is slightly clumsy settles people down, and the brand exists to help someone deliver a feeling they find difficult to say.

I designed and produced postcards, stationery and goods for it. The products are simple. The decision underneath them is not.

Why the lettering is not neat

Neat lettering performs. It says: someone skilled made this, admire it. That is the opposite of what a card is for. A card is a place where a person who cannot say a thing out loud says it anyway, and the writing on it should make that easier rather than setting a standard they then feel they have failed.

So the letters wobble. They are honest about the hand that made them, and people relax around them. Every time I have tidied the lettering up, the thing has got worse.

What a stationery brand actually sells

Not paper. Permission. The reason I keep working on this instead of moving on to something with better margins is that the moment a card does its job is completely invisible to me — it happens between two people I will never meet — and I find that a much more interesting thing to design for than something I can measure.

KKUMUL is also where I learned production: paper weights, print methods, what survives a post office, what a small run costs and what it costs to be wrong about a small run. Berrapy and Kikobana both got easier because KKUMUL went first.