The new year is definitely in full swing and we couldn’t be more excited about what we have in store. Our team spent the break resting, reflecting, and catching up with families in the Netherlands (Abel), Waterloo and New York (Biying and Matt), Ottawa (Rob), and nestled deep in cottage country (Ray). Last year was a banner year at Hot Pop Factory: we completed over 1,400 projects, launched Hot Pop Goods with the release of a collection of brandable wood wares, and strengthened community relations with a roster of amazing organizations including Luminato, Maker Festival, the One of a Kind Show & Sale, The Stop Community Food Centre, and Toronto Design Offsite Festival. We’d like to extend a big thank you to everybody we worked with last year!

While it’s impossible to choose ‘favourites’ amongst the thousand plus projects we produced last year, several do stand out. We were honoured to make a small contribution to Canada 150! by designing 10,000 lapel pins (and their packaging) for the sesquicentennial – those pins were given to esteemed honourees from coast to coast. The Wishing Bird was a design close to our heart that we produced in-house for our ambitious clients; beyond its handsome wireframe aesthetic, we felt it was a warm little totem that hopefully inspired some positive thinking in its recipients. We were also proud of our work reinventing Nikoleta & Associates’ sales tools, and, on the precision side, it was rewarding to execute technically demanding projects like the custom mazes that Beau’s used to mark the release of a new IPA and the insane intricacy of Shirley Liang’s avant garde garments.

Beyond the thrill of completing particular projects it’s also worth acknowledging that last year we made a conscious effort to fill out our offerings – to include full service design and production of custom goods.We’re now pretty uniquely positioned to empower professionals in adjacent industries to take advantage of short run and additive manufacturing; we can help turn ideas into production ready designs and then get that work made and to an audience in a matter of days.

The fact we are expanding our services is inspired by what we see happening around us: Toronto and the wider GTA are full of ebbing entrepreneurial spirit, with a young generation of creative thinkers eager to work on hard problems. Whether we are collaborating with a one-person business run from home, or a Fortune 500, our role is to help innovators with a vision make their ideas physical reality, and quickly release it to their audience in a matter of days.

We have many big projects in the works for 2018 including plans to upgrade operations, and to grow much of our web content and portfolio. We’re also growing our team, and just posted for a Sales and Marketing Assistant position. Check out our Careers Page for all the details.

One more time: thanks to all that we collaborated with last year. We look forward to making more great things together in 2018!

Featured clients: Totem Design Co., Engineering Link, Twitter, Purch, xliangdesign, Beau’s, Pomp & Circumstance, Forest & Waves, Diana Watters Handmade, Moniker,  Nikoleta & Associates