59: The Passion Paradigm with Annaka Hoelk

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Industrial designer Annika Hulk discusses her transition from studying architecture in London to building a design brand and educational pre

Key takeaways

• Annika's first product, the Nook Vase, was developed by repurposing acrylic scraps using a solvent welding process.
• She asserts that only 10% of running a design brand is actual design work, with the rest being marketing, shipping, and logistics.

Main topics

• Industrial Design Career Path
• Small Business Logistics and Shipping

Notable quotes

Only 10% of what you do is actually design.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a pragmatic guide for young creatives, emphasizi

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:03) Please hold whilst we connect you to Redacted. Speaker 1 (0:24) And this is Annika Hulk, and you're listening to Redacted. Today, Speaker 5 (0:31) we're joined by Annika Hulk, a Canadian industrial designer, entrepreneur, and design educator who's built a following by making design more accessible to everyday audiences. From launching her own decor brand to creating online content that demystifies design, demonstrates how to make a good floral arrangement, and tackles the uncomfortable questions the design industry often avoids. Annika brings a candid perspective on creativity, business, taste, and the challenges facing the furniture and homeware industries today. Speaker 1 (0:59) Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Speaker 4 (1:04) Annika, welcome to the show. So to start off, who is Anna Hulk? Speaker 2 (1:08) I'm an industrial designer. I am a business owner and I'm now a design educator as a consequence of being a business owner, I would say, because of social media. Speaker 4 (1:20) Yeah, fantastic. How did you stumble across the field of industrial design originally? Speaker 2 (1:24) My family is mostly all in creative fields, especially on my mum's side. My grandparents were architects and interior designers and were a big part of the West Coast modern movement here on the West Coast of Canada, which is, fun fact, the only recognised modernist architectural movement in Canada is the West Coast modern movement. Speaker 5 (1:43) Well, I will link to that in the show notes. Yeah. Speaker 2 (1:46) That was my grandparents. And then my mom is an artist. And that kind of all just trickled down into our family culture of always being around design. I grew up in modernist homes. I grew up around a lot of the iconic pieces of furniture that we talk about and I talk about to this day. And then when it came... to choosing a university path, it was pretty clear that I wanted to do something creative. And it was a question between architecture or industrial design. And I actually did a year in spatial design and architecture in London at Central Saint Martins as my first year out of high school. And then decided I moved back home and finished my schooling in industrial design because I felt that industrial design encapsulates a smaller use case, which I find much more interesting. I find that architecture felt very large and projects take a very long time to... finish and the relation to the human and relation to the body is just very different and I much prefer working on objects that people are using and handling and can be moved around and are smaller and fell into it that way. Speaker 4 (2:44) Yeah, awesome. So you talk about some of the objects that you grew up with that inspired your journey. Is there any objects that come to mind? Speaker 2 (2:52) All the classics, my grandparents, and then byproduct of that, my mom and my uncles were all collectors of beautiful modernist design. So everything from Eames to Ingo Maurer lamps and all Italian modernism, Eileen Gray, all of that, Le Corbusier chairs, things that you would very much recognize that I didn't realize at the time were such recognizable pieces. They were just what I grew up around. And then very luckily had that headstart in my design education. Speaker 5 (3:17) Did you say you did a year at Central St. Martin's? I Speaker 2 (3:20) did, yeah. Speaker 5 (3:21) Was it your foundational year or something? Speaker 2 (3:24) Yeah, I did my foundation year there and got into their architecture program and then had the decision to make of, OK, do I actually want to pursue architecture, especially as an international student in the UK with all the fees involved and was like, OK, I really have to want to do this to justify it. And then decided, no, I actually didn't want to do that and was very happy with that decision. Industrial design ended up being far more my speed and the objects that I wanted to be working on. Speaker 5 (3:49) Were there any lessons learned in that first foundational year that you still carry on to this day? Speaker 2 (3:54) I would say that school was just very, very rigorous in the sense of output and just doing a lot of work. And I think that really set me up coming back to for the rest of my degree in Canada and kept that momentum of always doing a lot of sketches, always doing a lot of physical work and working through creative block or waiting for inspiration. That really isn't a thing when you just need to do it. I do think that inspiration is a bit of a fallacy in that sense that you have to wait for it to strike. I think you have to work through it. I carry that attitude that they taught us there through most things. Speaker 5 (4:26) Do you say waiting for inspiration is a weakness of others so far? Speaker 2 (4:31) Oh, I don't know about that. I wouldn't want to judge. I don't know everyone's practices. I would say that it's maybe more of a misconception that non-creatives have of designers and creatives. I think most designers would agree that you don't just sit and stare at a wall and then the muse strikes you. That's not really how it works. I think that that's sometimes the perception that I get from my friends who aren't in creative fields. They're like, oh, how do you find inspiration? And I'm like, well, it's research, it's work. Sometimes it's sketching and drawing and thinking, even when you have no inspiration and you don't know what you're making and nothing looks good, you still have to put the work in and put pen to paper and see what comes of that. So I think that's just out there in the world is this idea of creative muse or inspiration. Inspiration isn't fake. It just doesn't strike you randomly. You have to go find it and work for it. Speaker 4 (5:22) After university, how did you make your first big break? Speaker 2 (5:25) Honestly, I don't know if there is one particular thing. If there is a big break, I'm not sure if I've had it yet. Maybe I'm still waiting. As with the work thing, as I just said, I think it's been incremental. steps in the right direction mostly and little wins along the way of winning an award here or getting published here or launching my first product and having my first viral video because that's the age we're in as well. But all these little things, I couldn't really say that one was like, oh, that's it. That made my career. I don't think that's necessarily happened, but little steps in the right direction is where I'm at. Speaker 5 (6:00) Can you give us an example of some of those cumulative steps? Speaker 2 (6:03) For example, I won a local. design award here in Vancouver, but Western Canada, there's a publication called Western Living Magazine. They do a designers of the year and they have an industrial design category. It's very much not known outside of this area. Put my name out there in my local community, which then opened some doors and allowed me to make more connections and things like that, I would say, have been helpful, as well as social media, deciding to put videos out there and a lot of videos before something. really stuck or that I found a way of communicating that resonated with people and having the first one that did really well and thinking, okay, this is actually what I want to be doing. And people are responding to that. So that another example would be that or launching my first product, which for me felt like really big. Speaker 4 (6:50) Yeah, that's huge. Speaker 2 (6:52) And at first, actually, sales weren't that great. And it was a bit scary because you put something out there and sometimes you hope maybe it'll take off. And that didn't happen at first. But It then trickled in slowly and then it grew and it's growing. And I think, again, that's the lesson of some people are lucky enough to have the experience that one thing just takes off. That's the big break. And for me, it's been the experience more so of you do something and then you still chip away at it and you still need to learn and then you still need to promote and you still need to do all the things and then things grow slowly. But growth is still growth in the right direction. Speaker 5 (7:28) Yeah, yeah, for sure. Did Western Living tell you how they found you or was it purely by Instagram? Speaker 2 (7:33) It's an application. So I knew of this, but I actually applied in the hopes because they do an emerging design shout out, but you can't apply for that. You just have to apply for the main award. And then if you're an emerging designer, they might give you the emerging designer award. And so I was like, oh, maybe I'll get the emerging designer award. And then won the actual award. And I was like, oh, not what I was expecting. So I guess sometimes the lesson is just put your name in the ring and see what happens too. Speaker 5 (7:58) It sounds more democratic than the local equivalent here. What was that first product? Speaker 2 (8:03) It's called the Nook Vase. It's a flower vase. Speaker 5 (8:06) So what's the story behind that first flower vase? Why did you decide to do it? What was the inspiration? It actually Speaker 2 (8:12) started as a school project. It was my last year of school. I was working on my grad project, which was lighting, which has nothing to do with what I'm doing now. I had this other random course. I can't remember what it was called. And there was a project due and it was the next day. Hadn't done it yet. And it was about recycling or repurposing materials. And because I was working with lighting for my grad project, I had a bunch of acrylic that I was using for lighting tests. They were scraps. And I was like, okay, well, that's repurposing. What can I do with this pile of acrylic scraps I have for this other project? And I came across the process of solvent welding, which is how the vase is made. And a lot of my products are made, which is assembling flat sheet of acrylic or pieces of acrylic through... a chemical melting process, basically. And you can buy that chemical. It's not dangerous. It's very easy to acquire. I Googled my local plastic shop and was like, can I get this? And then I came up with the idea of a vase because separately, I have a whole Pinterest board of wacky vases. And I like the idea of flowers not being presented in conventional ways. Then I love this idea of how do you make a vase that presents flowers in a more unique way that actually maybe does something, reflects it, encases it, encloses it. shadows it something that's not just here put it in some water and so I had these acrylic scraps put those two ideas together of the solvent welding and then that design came from it then I forgot about it for a few years graduated and when it came to starting the business I was like What do I have that I can launch as a first product that's easy to manufacture and interesting and that I haven't seen and hasn't been done? And I was looking at new things I was working on, then ended up circling back to this design from school and was like, if I refine that, that's actually a really cool idea. And that's how it came about. Speaker 4 (9:58) Yeah, awesome. You've got the Nook phase and I saw you've also got the Payne's phase. Can you get into where the name came from? Speaker 2 (10:04) It was originally supposed to be Payne's Gray, which is an artist pigment color. Again, going back to my mom being an artist, it's one of her favorite pigments. And Payne's Gray is a very specific deep blue-gray color. And it's a very standard artist pigment you can buy in artist shops like Hooker's Green or Ultramarine Blue. It's just one of the colors. Originally, the concept was that that vase was going to be that color. And I couldn't find the right shade of acrylic to really do it. So I gave up on that. But the name stuck as an homage to that original idea. And I also like the idea that panes, it's spelled a different way, but I feel like that vase, it looks like panes of glass. It's got repeating compartments. So I was like, maybe it's a play on words. Speaker 5 (10:47) When you launch your first product, you have these big high hopes that it's just going to take off. And it did eventually, but what was that runway process? Did you have to get some media releases first or you continually pushed it for six months? I Speaker 2 (10:59) think that's a very honest thing I can say to anyone who's listening, who is a young designer is if this happens to you, you're not alone. If you launch something, you think maybe I'm going to be the next star and it's going to go super viral or it's going to take off or whatever. And my experience is more like crickets for a little bit and then a few sales and then comes the rest of business, which unfortunately is not the fun part of design. It's the how do you market it? How do you get it in the right places? How do you get it in stores? How do you... do ads? How do you create a following on social media? And how do you get it published? All these other things. There's so many channels that you can use to get a product out there and in front of the right people and in front of customers. And you have to learn how to take advantage of all of those and how to use all of those channels. And that is something I learned after I launched it, not before. I think the smart thing to do would be to know how to do those things prior, but came about in the end. And I'm still learning the nitty gritty of business rather than design, which is maybe a little bit less interesting. But it's ads, getting in contact with stores and finding the right stores that you think really will work with you and represent things properly and all the rest of it. Speaker 1 (12:09) This is Anika Hulk. And you're Speaker 2 (12:18) listening to... Speaker 1 (12:22) Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Hey, Speaker 3 (12:26) it's Will here. At Redacted, we believe that everyone has a role to play in making the world a little better, even in the smallest ways. Sometimes shining a light on the good stuff is all it takes to spark change or rally others to a bigger cause. This is why we've teamed up with the Better Future Awards, a global network of design awards that celebrate products, studios, and ideas making a real difference. Whether it's environmental impact, social equity, or economic outcomes, these awards highlight the work that pushes us forward. The nominations are open now, so if you or someone in your orbit has been creating something meaningful, consider throwing a hat in the ring. To find out more about the Better Future Awards, head to betterfutureawards.com forward slash redacted. That's betterfutureawards.com forward slash redacted. You can also find the link at the top of the show notes. Redacted. Speaker 1 (13:14) Redacted. Redacted. Redacted. Speaker 5 (13:18) Maybe walking it back a bit, you've finished university. What was the catalyst for striking it out on your own instead of working for a business? I Speaker 2 (13:26) finished university. I did a few internships. I did internships throughout university in a few different fields. I worked at Lululemon because that's a Vancouver company. And I did an internship in their store design department. I was like, okay, maybe that's not for me. Speaker 3 (13:41) I Speaker 2 (13:42) knew I always wanted to start my own company. I wanted to be in Vancouver, basically. I couldn't get a job that I wanted in Vancouver. So then it became a question of, do I move abroad to then work for someone else, to then get the experience, to then move home, to then start a company? I thought, while I'm young and can live cheaply and can take the risk, just start the thing I want to do on my own right away. Why would I learn for