In reading this post I can’t help but think of countless episodes of “Kitchen Nightmares” where someone, successful in another field, or blessed with an inheritance or rich parents, decides to open a restaurant, despite having no experience in the trade. As you can imagine it all goes horribly wrong – and it’s not just the food that ends up getting burnt.

Putting this image aside for a bit, my other thought is what’s your value proposition? What can you offer that established, proven foundries can’t? What will convince type designers to throw their hat in with your new company? Perhaps it’s as simple as offering large advances on royalties?

This might be the question that hover above the head of every one of us typophiles, including me. Dave, what’s you’re planning to be? A one man foundry or a collective foundry?

Sii, thanks for your comments. I admit I am at the beginning of considering all of this but I’m sorry if you have the impression I’m incapable of making this work or that I would be as unopen and unresponsive to critique and advice as the people on that show. I am relatively successful in a closely related field and I am not receiving hand outs so I would have to work hard.

What I would be offering is an collective Australian voice, I have some material lined up and some designers ready to participate. I think Australian type design needs a representative as none currently (of any great virtue) currently exist. Large advances in royalties may lure designers but I’m unable to tell if this would be possible financial, or would in fact be sensible.

Mk2, it would definitely be a collective, I currently have no type designs worth licensing. I don’t know what my plan is as yet, nor do I know whether I really want to proceed and put in all the effort this is going to take to make successful.

there’s money in fonts?

-=®=-

Yes. But you need a stake to play the game.
Getting a critical mass of product is a big first hurdle.

Hi David. It’s encouraging to see an Australian announce an interest in starting up this kind of outfit. An Australian collective would be unique and have the potential to improve the situation in our country.

As an Australian type designer I am underrepresented. I support your idea in theory. In practice I make mainly strange, unconventional, original types not based closely on existing type designs, and these kinds of faces don’t sell in appreciable numbers. I’d gladly offer them to you for your collective, but would it be worth your while trying to market them? Somehow I don’t think so. Plus I have my own highly-developed indie type house marketing, brand / branding and branding communications strategy already worked out.

On the positive side I have started making commercial text and display fonts which need better marketing / distribution. If that material would be of interest you may certainly contact me offline.

j a m e s

David, I should add that there isn’t a lot of money in retail fonts unless you are a large vendor like Fonts.com, Myfonts, Ascender Corp or Veer, with sizable collections of trendy commercial fonts from numerous sources. Some font buyers grumble about the price of retail fonts, but in reality vendors sell them at an absurdly low price and still have trouble turning in the kind of sizable revenue required to sustain a going business. Small vendors usually are not successful and rapidly go out of business.

The real money in type design is in commissioned works

j a m e s

hey! this is a sweet idea, couldn’t a foundry exist based on Geographic interest? (Australia)

I apologize and try not to offend any Australian designers here, but where I am in Canada I don’t see much Australian influence (which is a problem that needs to be corrected!)

What if instead of offering the default types, you started a small foundry, with a big heart. What if instead of trying to sell global fonts to an australian market, you sold Australian fonts to a global market?

If you could somehow distill what it means to be Australian, what it means to have Australian layout, or Australian type, and market that image, I know I would pay for the ability to capture the spirit of Australia and inject it into my designs!

I’ve got a cousin who went to Aus. for school....and I don’t think he’s ever coming back :-)

I’m not sure how quickly you want to grow, but I don’t think you need a lot of money to start a foundry, just time. For $20 a month or so, you can host a site that will allow more traffic than you will ever get. Maybe a few hundred or thousand dollars extra for ads here and there, but I don’t think you need the level of capital that would require getting investors or bank loans or anything (and good luck making that happen for the next year or two!)

If your typefaces are really good, there’s plenty of small foundry pools out there like vllg.com and Type Trust that might publish your fonts, and they give full credit to your foundry. Even “big time” places like Veer give complete credit to the designer and/or foundry. Once you get a few type designs published, you could think more about developing your own foundry into a go-to shop. But when you have only a few fonts under your belt it would make more sense to me to put them out there on established sites as your primary point of sales. You might take a look at Underware.nl as a case study, they only have a few fonts for sale, but each one is really unique and has an incredible level of thought and skill apparent in its design. They sell their fonts on other sites, too.

Hope that helps, I would like to start a foundry myself, too, but I plan on taking it slow. If you want something that’s quickly profitable, typeface design is not the route to go — not as difficult as saying “I’m going to be a rock star” with no musical training and never being in a band or performing in front of an audience, but it’s close.

Some good things to think about from Josh (Feel). I’ve posted my take on font distribution here.

Dave, I wouldn’t give too much credence to what people who don’t actually run viable commercial foundries have to say.*
And the people who do aren’t giving away too many trade secrets.

*Notwithstanding Stephen’s overview.

For $20 a month or so, you can host a site that will allow more traffic than you will ever get. Maybe a few hundred or thousand dollars extra for ads here and there,

This made me laugh out loud. Will that $20 cover your shopping cart, your payment gateway or your merchant services fees?

This made me laugh out loud. Will that $20 cover your shopping cart, your payment gateway or your merchant services fees?

In the beginning, it is certainly possible to sell typefaces using very little cash, particularly if you are using a service like PayPal to process your transactions. Because the service handles just about every part of the transaction, then things like a merchant account, payment gateway or SSL certificate are unnecessary. The processor takes care of that for you. Money that might be spent on those items comes directly out of your sales in the form of a percent to the payment processor. And, if you know how to wrangle a little code, you can easily set up a shopping cart yourself.

This can be a great way to start (and is in fact how we started) so you have very little cash investment up front. The only time you pay for services related to taking in money is when, in fact, you take in money.

Not so funny now, eh?

I’m still laughing Nicole. Tell Eric I said hello.

@terminaldesign: There are lots of off-the-shelf free shopping carts now, like Ubercart, and my experience with setting up online stores and the necessary card processing stuff that goes with it is similar to Nicole’s, in that your expenditures are proportional to what you sell. So it depends on if you look at those fees as overhead on your product, or as part of web hosting. My point, though, was that you don’t need to raise capital or take out a loan to start a type foundry.

@Nick: I state outright that I don’t run a foundry, but would like to someday. I feel like I’ve paid enough attention to the different business models out there, though, that I more or less have an idea about how I would approach it, and phattexta seems to be in a similar place. Any corrections you would make, as someone who does run a foundry, or is that top-secret :)

I would ask yourself, what right do the fonts I am going to publish have to exist?
What kind of typefaces will they be?
Is there an existing or emergent market for them?
Do they express something that caters to or can create its own niche in the marketplace?
I don’t believe that the people who are making a go of this set out to “run a foundry”, they decided to design, make, and publish certain kinds of typefaces.
So that’s what should be at the centre of your business plan.
The way it stands at the moment, your business model could be applied to just about anything.

fonts designed with the express purpose of being embedded on the web or for use in other places where the current licensing of most commonly used commercial fonts don’t allow.

Niche market of licensing could be one approach?

@innovati

That web embedding stuff is coming from the major and minor players very very soon, so...

@terminaldesign: That web embedding stuff is coming from the major and minor players very very soon, so...

It already arrived several months ago with Pyke’s Peake Zero, and I’m happy to report that PP Zero works as font advertising. It has generated steady sales of the full-blown Pyke’s Peake font. So there is profit to be had from making entries into the embeddable web fonts game. Yes it’s true.

This is topic drift, but what was it somebody said about not giving credence to people who don’t run commercially viable foundries? The following is aimed at that person and not terminaldesign. Plunder my interesting vocabulary as lingua franca to liven up your own word smithing, then discount me as a minor player. Thanks so much, it really endears me to you (not).

j a m e s