When Everingham & Watson’s first tea towel design came off the rack two years ago, the eponymous designers each experienced a very different reaction.
Susie Everingham and Liz Watson – an easy collaboration.
“It was a pineapple,” recalls Liz Watson, “black printed on beige. Susie [Everingham] was about to press the ‘send’ button to the printers, and I broke out into a rash. I thought they’d be in the present drawer forever.”
Meanwhile, Susie was popping open the champagne to celebrate their first run of one hundred. “Now we do runs in quantities we never expected,” she comments of their trademark pineapple motif, which owes more than a little to nostalgic memories of the Big Pineapple on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
Screen-printed tea towels were the first product by Everingham & Watson.
Susie and Liz hark from Brisbane, and have been firm friends for twenty years. Their different temperaments no doubt contribute to a happy design partnership, as do their differing skill sets, which share some neat common ground. Susie is a businesswoman and lawyer who also trained in interior design, while Liz is a visual artist who also studied graphic design and arts administration. Their designs are collaborative, and there is an easy to-and-fro between Liz’s self-confessed penchant for two-dimensional design and Susie’s ability to transform drawings into the physical realm and realize colour.
“We grew up with Marimekko and timeless, colourful things,” says Susie. The two also love old wares and snooping around vintage markets. Liz recalls being in London and seeing the revival of the Keep Calm and Carry On movement – she returned home to pick up conversations with Susie about “establishing a small business and tinkering with designs.”
Their small retail space is a shed office inside an inner-city warehouse. The box-within-a-box is decked with screen-printed ply furniture and a floor of seagrass matting. The retail space acts as a shop two days a week, and also as a secondary stockroom for their ever-increasing online distribution business. Besides featuring a majority of their own designs on giftware and homewares (including screen-printed cushions, blackboards in the shape of Australian states, and thick, creamy embossed cards), they also display work by fellow Australian designer-makers, picked with a curatorial eye to complement their own work. Tapping into a history of Australiana, they steer the road from kitsch to tasteful with panache and humour, and have a demanding eye for quality. With their Oz crest of a banana, prawn, merino ram and pineapple proudly hanging on the back wall of their shop, perhaps a Surf n’ Turf range will be next.
