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When Nick Oldland graduated from Mount Allison University in
New Brunswick, Canada with a degree in fine arts and photography his parents
had already started the company that would shape his career. Hatley Design Company, based in Toronto,
Ontario, began 15 years ago, centered around Nick’s mother, Alice’s
artwork. She opened a gift shop and
gallery and soon Nick’s father, John, a business professor, began looking for
the best ways to sell his wife’s artwork.
It wasn’t long before her artwork graced the front of t-shirts and
aprons. Nick helped out along the way
with the artwork, but when his parents retired from the business 6 years ago,
Nick and his two brothers, Chris and Jeremey stepped up to the plate (or the
design table, if you will) and kept Hatley running. The brothers Oldland haven’t just continued the business but
grown it by leaps, bounds and an ever-growing product line. Hatley is now larger than ever with accounts
all across America and the UK in specialty stores.
As one of the designers for Hatley, humor is definitely what
keeps Nick motivated. He says, “Humor
is a mode of communication. Some
artists paint on canvas, but in the last 20 years especially, t-shirts and
clothing have become a way to communicate fun ideas. I always try to communicate humor through our products.” Form, function and communication are also
what determine Hatley’s expanding product line. From clothing to napkins, notepads and bed sheets – anything that
is suitable to communicate a fun idea is game.
Nick’s ideas come from anywhere and always revolve around
whatever animals he’s into at the time.
He explains that, “If an idea is really good and there is a simple way
to communicate it, the concept of the design can happen really fast. Some ideas take longer – years even. That’s the strange thing – sometimes it
comes fast and other times it’s like pulling teeth.” One thing remains a constant: Nick’s love of animal imagery. When he first got his 5-year-old Chocolate
Lab, Jessie, he was constantly drawing her.
Then as his Lab designs drew a huge demand, he just kept on drawing. The
muse for his Lab designs, Jessie acts as Nick’s inspiration, model and comic
relief. This still surprises Nick since
he never grew up with dogs. Nick’s wife Abbey had always had dogs in her life
and really wanted to get one. Once they got Jessie, Nick was in love. In his own words, “Labs are funny. I always thought about them as the classic
dog but it was absolutely shocking to me how she cannot control her
appetite. I mean you can’t even leave
her alone with food. She just doesn’t
even know when to stop. She’ll eat
anything. I question my dog’s
intelligence but that is part of her charm.
I always thought they were rather goofy, yet Jessie is shifty. She’s not the most disciplined dog on the
planet but that’s what I love about her.
She’s shifty; she has a plan of her own. It’s weird. I never
thought I’d be a dog lover.”
He helps spread the love to the rest of us dog lovers by
immortalizing Jessie’s image forever in fun, crisp, clean designs on boxers, flannel
pajamas and sheet sets. Yet his sights
aren’t just always set on Jessie. From
cats to moose, Nick creates designs for a wide range of animals depending on
what he is into at the time. “I always
get excited about a certain animal.
Right now, for some reason, it's horses.”
Nick draws his designs directly onto the computer using a
Wacom tablet, which is really a large drawing board connected to the
computer. This allows him to create
painterly designs with ease and transfer the images directly onto paper or
clothing. Oddly enough, the challenge
in Hatley’s designs is simplification – both of imagery, message and product
line. For a while, Nick and his
brothers experimented with a broad range of products on which to feature their
designs but now they are focused on paring them down to their core products,
particularly their clothing. Their
designs always seemed best suited for clothing, but so much attention was paid
to the design that often there wasn’t much detail spent on the clothing
itself. Nick explains that, “It’s just
me and my two brothers and we’re designing mainly for women so the clothes we
designed were really ugly and never really fit very well. Thus this past year we hired a designer to
make all of our clothing more fashionable, wearable and comfortable. Now it fits really well and looks really
good.”
As Nick will be the first to tell you, Hatley’s fun, simple
and colorful designs do not equate into easy work. “The creativity is limitless and you can really go to town. You
are not limited by what you can do creatively.
Sometimes designs in and of themselves are very limiting. It is really difficult to do something that
works and is very simple. There are
many designs whose ideas were fast in the making but the simplification of the
design itself took forever. It’s
actually very laborious but not as satisfying.
With the t-shirts and notepads you can be funny and not have to worry so
much about a simple design.” The
concepts for the notepads come to Nick a lot quicker than other designs because
they’re not as constrained. Nick laughs
saying, “I could make three notepad designs a week.” Thinking for a moment and tempering himself he says, “Okay, maybe
not three. I could make one a
week. Then again, we only turn out 6-12
notepad designs total in a year so that tells you how much work gets put into
it all and how much longer all the other designs take.”
Sharing in the creative process are Nick’s wife Abbey, his
20-month-old son, Quinn and 3-week-old newborn, Dexter. And of course, Lab
Jessie. Nick laughs, “I love my
dog. She loves to run – in fact I wish
she’d stop running so much. She rolls
in anything dead. Every time she comes
home from being out she just reeks. She
eats the most disgusting things – I don’t even want to tell you what she eats. I had NO IDEA they’d eat anything.”
What rings clear is Nick’s dedication: to his family, Hatley
and his clients. He emphasizes that,
“we’re really dedicated to trying to keep all of our products made in North
America. However, to remain competitive
we’ve had to venture overseas. It’s a
struggle because we want to consistently continue to provide competitive,
funny, comfortable products. In the
end, we’re a design company – and we’re only as good as our next design.” If Nick and his brothers keep up the great
work, Hatley will remain a fashion favorite for cat nappers and dog lovers alike.
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