A Family AffaiR
By Regan M. White

When Nick Oldland graduated from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada with a degree in fine arts and photography his parents had already started the company that would shape his career. Hatley Design Company, based in Toronto, Ontario, began 15 years ago, centered around Nick’s mother, Alice’s artwork. She opened a gift shop and gallery and soon Nick’s father, John, a business professor, began looking for the best ways to sell his wife’s artwork. It wasn’t long before her artwork graced the front of t-shirts and aprons. Nick helped out along the way with the artwork, but when his parents retired from the business 6 years ago, Nick and his two brothers, Chris and Jeremey stepped up to the plate (or the design table, if you will) and kept Hatley running. The brothers Oldland haven’t just continued the business but grown it by leaps, bounds and an ever-growing product line. Hatley is now larger than ever with accounts all across America and the UK in specialty stores.

As one of the designers for Hatley, humor is definitely what keeps Nick motivated. He says, “Humor is a mode of communication. Some artists paint on canvas, but in the last 20 years especially, t-shirts and clothing have become a way to communicate fun ideas. I always try to communicate humor through our products.” Form, function and communication are also what determine Hatley’s expanding product line. From clothing to napkins, notepads and bed sheets – anything that is suitable to communicate a fun idea is game.

Nick’s ideas come from anywhere and always revolve around whatever animals he’s into at the time. He explains that, “If an idea is really good and there is a simple way to communicate it, the concept of the design can happen really fast. Some ideas take longer – years even. That’s the strange thing – sometimes it comes fast and other times it’s like pulling teeth.” One thing remains a constant: Nick’s love of animal imagery. When he first got his 5-year-old Chocolate Lab, Jessie, he was constantly drawing her. Then as his Lab designs drew a huge demand, he just kept on drawing. The muse for his Lab designs, Jessie acts as Nick’s inspiration, model and comic relief. This still surprises Nick since he never grew up with dogs. Nick’s wife Abbey had always had dogs in her life and really wanted to get one. Once they got Jessie, Nick was in love. In his own words, “Labs are funny. I always thought about them as the classic dog but it was absolutely shocking to me how she cannot control her appetite. I mean you can’t even leave her alone with food. She just doesn’t even know when to stop. She’ll eat anything. I question my dog’s intelligence but that is part of her charm. I always thought they were rather goofy, yet Jessie is shifty. She’s not the most disciplined dog on the planet but that’s what I love about her. She’s shifty; she has a plan of her own. It’s weird. I never thought I’d be a dog lover.”

He helps spread the love to the rest of us dog lovers by immortalizing Jessie’s image forever in fun, crisp, clean designs on boxers, flannel pajamas and sheet sets. Yet his sights aren’t just always set on Jessie. From cats to moose, Nick creates designs for a wide range of animals depending on what he is into at the time. “I always get excited about a certain animal. Right now, for some reason, it's horses.”

Nick draws his designs directly onto the computer using a Wacom tablet, which is really a large drawing board connected to the computer. This allows him to create painterly designs with ease and transfer the images directly onto paper or clothing. Oddly enough, the challenge in Hatley’s designs is simplification – both of imagery, message and product line. For a while, Nick and his brothers experimented with a broad range of products on which to feature their designs but now they are focused on paring them down to their core products, particularly their clothing. Their designs always seemed best suited for clothing, but so much attention was paid to the design that often there wasn’t much detail spent on the clothing itself. Nick explains that, “It’s just me and my two brothers and we’re designing mainly for women so the clothes we designed were really ugly and never really fit very well. Thus this past year we hired a designer to make all of our clothing more fashionable, wearable and comfortable. Now it fits really well and looks really good.”

As Nick will be the first to tell you, Hatley’s fun, simple and colorful designs do not equate into easy work. “The creativity is limitless and you can really go to town. You are not limited by what you can do creatively. Sometimes designs in and of themselves are very limiting. It is really difficult to do something that works and is very simple. There are many designs whose ideas were fast in the making but the simplification of the design itself took forever. It’s actually very laborious but not as satisfying. With the t-shirts and notepads you can be funny and not have to worry so much about a simple design.” The concepts for the notepads come to Nick a lot quicker than other designs because they’re not as constrained. Nick laughs saying, “I could make three notepad designs a week.” Thinking for a moment and tempering himself he says, “Okay, maybe not three. I could make one a week. Then again, we only turn out 6-12 notepad designs total in a year so that tells you how much work gets put into it all and how much longer all the other designs take.”

Sharing in the creative process are Nick’s wife Abbey, his 20-month-old son, Quinn and 3-week-old newborn, Dexter. And of course, Lab Jessie. Nick laughs, “I love my dog. She loves to run – in fact I wish she’d stop running so much. She rolls in anything dead. Every time she comes home from being out she just reeks. She eats the most disgusting things – I don’t even want to tell you what she eats. I had NO IDEA they’d eat anything.”

What rings clear is Nick’s dedication: to his family, Hatley and his clients. He emphasizes that, “we’re really dedicated to trying to keep all of our products made in North America. However, to remain competitive we’ve had to venture overseas. It’s a struggle because we want to consistently continue to provide competitive, funny, comfortable products. In the end, we’re a design company – and we’re only as good as our next design.” If Nick and his brothers keep up the great work, Hatley will remain a fashion favorite for cat nappers and dog lovers alike.