Felton in the frame

It has taken graphic designer Roger Felton and his wife Kate six years and quite a lot of cash to come up with a world-beating product. But will it fly?

ROGER FELTON slips out of the room at the top of his Dickensian-warehouse studio in London’s Bleeding Heart Yard, to return moments later with two cardboard boxes.

On the face of it, there is nothing unusual about these boxes. They are long, shallow and rectangular, but they are the final step in a long battle to make sure that Pop-up Frames - the Felton invention - is more sustainable than any competing product on the market.

Inside each box, there’s some pretty clever paper engineering: four, flat-packed pieces of high-quality, 350gsm card that lock together to make a lightweight and robust tray frame. Apart from the cute construction, there are two key innovations: the picture frames can be cut to different sizes before assembly (that’s the one that won the international patents, and gave it world-first status), and they’re cheap as chips.

Think about it: frames lend significance to whatever is put into them - a rock concert ticket, a child’s drawing of a house, a bow-tie, an out-of-focus photograph, an off the cuff sketch or cartoon. But people don’t normally put these things into frames because framing is too expensive. So, what if it wasn’t? What if you could buy a good-looking reusable frame for less than the price of a glass of wine?

Roger’s wife Kate is a Suffolk artist best known for her large-scale oil paintings. When her paintings are displayed in galleries, they are conventionally framed. But like most artists she produces sketches that might also sell - at a lower price, say £20. But with bespoke wooden frames costing around £40 to make, and galleries taking up to 50 per cent of the sale price, the numbers simply didn’t stack up - unless the cost of framing could be made cheaper.

That’s where Roger’s thinking started, and working with ‘production guru’ Matt Reddings - now a shareholder in the business - he spent years on one prototype after another, working out how to fit the frame together.

“There was a lot of cutting up bits of paper,” Roger says. “It’s a very three dimensional thing, it’s not something that you can sketch you actually have to make these things up. The light bulb moment was when I worked out that you can create a single element that would fit together four times.”

He adds: “One of the problems we faced initially was the perception that a paper frame would be flimsy. In fact, the cross bracing and construction makes them remarkably solid. They may be light, but they’re really, really strong.”

It hasn’t been an easy journey. Kate and Roger met when they worked at the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in the 1980s before Roger set up his own business, and they’re both used to working in service industries.

“It has taken a long time to get the frames correct and after the frames to get the packaging correct, and sustainable, and getting it all to be the right design,” Kate says. “No one ever warns you when you come up with an idea just how difficult it’ll be to get it to market. If you have a service company you can adapt to the customer’s needs, it’s fluid, but with a product it has got to be absolutely exact. And it’s quite scary, because the investment and the time and the risk is just unbelievable.”

The market potential, though, is huge: parents and grandparents framing kids’ pictures (freeing up the fridge door); renters who are not allowed to hammer nails into their landlord’s walls; first-time home owners on a budget; students in halls of residence; craft hobbyists; and those making displays for weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. If it takes off, Pop-up Frames could become the disposable camera of its generation.

One of the reasons Roger and Kate are so excited about the cardboard boxes is that several major galleries and museums loved the Pop-up Frames concept, but thought the original packaging (in poly bags) wasn’t sustainable enough. The new packaging (which will be printed, not plain) solves that problem, and even includes a clever pull-out cardboard hook at the top of the box so that they can be hung on display stands, as well as sent by mail.

“It’s literally the most sustainable frame anywhere in the world including the packaging and everything, which I am really chuffed about,” Roger says. “But also I think it looks good.”

The next challenge is getting the message out to potential buyers.

“I would say that for 99 per cent of people who take products to market, there is a product or products like it on the market already - they’re just doing a different version,” Roger says. “But with this it’s even more difficult because it’s a new product that people don’t know they need. So you’ve got to explain what it is and why they need it … that is the issue.”

But Kate’s enthusiasm is evident. “I really don’t like spending money on frames I’m going to use on my own walls,” she says. “But we have had such good fun using our own Pop-up Frames to test them out, putting children’s stuff in it and loving the fact that the frame makes it look really good. And then creating a whole wall out of it … I’m actually creating a product that I want. You can create a home gallery and vary them up, make them different sizes and different colours - and then you can move them around or remove them altogether. It’s just incredible how adaptable it is.”

Pop-up Frames are on sale through Amazon and through a dedicated site - click here: https://popupframes.com. The small frames kits - from 15cm up to 30cm, including A5 and A4 - will sell for as little as £5. The medium and poster kits will retail from £7 to £12.50. Roger hopes people will buy them like they buy batteries and lightbulbs, in multi-packs so that there are always a few in store.