The Misprint Co.

words by niall roeder

When it comes to ideas, there’s the good, the bad and the ugly. Fidget spinners, avocado lattes, Samsung Galaxy Note 7s and hoverboards – all explosively bad and ugly ideas. Flow Hives, anything from Elon Musk and Halal Snack Packs – all ingeniously good ideas. Another to be added to the list of “good ideas” is The Misprint Co.

It’s a pretty simple concept. Under the mantra of “one person’s printing error is another person’s notebook”, The Misprint Co. turns used paper from offices into beautifully imperfect notebooks.

The Misprint Co. was started by two designers by trade, Kareena Harris and Jenny Buckler. Their day to day office activities meant they printed a massive amount of A4, most of which was hardly used and ended up in recycling bins. Being well aware that we only have one earth and it’d probably be a good idea to look after it, this got them feeling guilty… and then got them thinking.

You probably didn’t know…

• It takes 10L of water to make one A4 sheet of paper
• For every tonne of paper produced, another 98 tonnes of other resources is required
• Most of NZ’s paper recycling is sent to China

It’s safe to say that for most, recycling isn’t as environmentally friendly as you’d think. As the girl’s so elegantly put it, “we reckon repurposing before recycling is just common sense… so why not give paper a second chance before recycling?” And The Misprint Co. was born.

The crew now collects waste paper from offices around town and pumps out regular orders of good-looking notebooks. Competitions are held to see which local artist will be designing, personally numbering and signing the next notebook, with the latest being “Fern-land” – a stunning watercolour by Stephanie O’Kane.

We’re such big fans of what these girls are doing, we decided to get on board. You can find notebooks from The Misprint Co. in our QT Museum Wellington QTique (our weird and wonderful gift shop).