Two Bad Mice founding director Julian Williams charts the story of the company, from its early beginnings in Covent Garden to working with iconic illustrators, producing stunning ceramics, and now introducing its latest innovative products
We founded Two Bad Mice in 1985. And today it’s still being run by its founding directors – myself and Mami Williams – along with one staff member, Nikki.
We’ve always seen ourselves as an Anglo-Japanese company doing our own thing, and are well-known for our quality, humour and artwork.
Back in the 1980s, I was selling etchings from a weekend stall in Covent Garden Jubilee Craft Market. The concept was that I made cards of my etchings so that customers could buy a card and take it home to show their partners, before making the decision to buy one of my prints. The first batch of cards were black and white, and included quirky titles such as Cat Sausages.
I still regularly get customers from the 1980s contacting me, and recently we opened a showroom-gallery, which exhibits our products and my etchings from my Covent Garden days. It’s above a weekend Japanese café (Cha-ty) in a barn on our premises in the beautiful Pembrokeshire countryside. The café has a piano that was once owned by Princess Margaret, and it has become a social nexus of the village – people come from far and wide to visit us.
This autumn we are releasing a series of nature notebooks that are sold with envelopes and can be displayed in card racks
In the mid-1990s Two Bad Mice added other artists, including Anita Jeram (who illustrated Guess How Much I Love You, the iconic children’s book that has been translated into 57 languages and is licensed by Walker Children’s Books), and Fran Evans. Anna Shuttlewood is another leading artist who works with us.
Mami and I discovered the illustrations for Guess How Much I Love You in a bookshop in Islington in 1996, and a few months later, Anita started working with Two Bad Mice. With us, Anita established a reputation for her witty cards (to date more than 15 million cards have been sold in many countries across the world) that blend her ironic adult sense of humour with her children’s illustrations of rabbits and mice. Anita’s collaboration with Two Bad Mice has become a brand in its own right, and has expanded through licensing to reach a host of other companies creating a wide range of products – but Two Bad Mice has never stopped being at the heart of Anita’s artistic development.
In 2007 we added ceramics. To begin with, they were coffee cups and saucers made in Stoke; today our ceramics are mostly mugs and bowls, and the transfers and finishing is all still done in Stoke on ‘whites’ of our own shapes. The mugs are packed in colourful boxes and the illustrations, which tell stories, extend all over each mug.
Two Bad Mice was a much copied and envied brand in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, we are more of a niche brand doing our own thing – and perhaps a little forgotten. However, we have never copied what the rest of the market is doing, and we are currently going through a renaissance. This autumn we are releasing a series of nature notebooks that are sold with envelopes and can be displayed in card racks. The books feature 32 spreads, with each page illustrating a different bird or butterfly. We have already sold a lot of these notebooks and plan to rapidly expand the range.
Anita has also been working with us on a playing card memory game called ABC of Cats, and My Dog is… I haven’t seen Anita so excited for years; these new ideas seem to be a very big development.
It looks like this will be another exciting era for Two Bad Mice!
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