Brady Vest ushers Hammerpress into its third decade with a new Crossroads space — and a rising national profile

Hammerpress has occupied a lot of Crossroads-area real estate since 1994, when owner Brady Vest founded what is today one of the most admired letterpress print shops in the country.

“My first place was in the Leedy-Voulkos building,” Vest tells The Pitch. “[Kansas City Art Institute printmaking professor] Hugh Merrill let me put my press and all my crap in the back of his shop and figure out what I wanted to do. But the space was above the gallery and below Jim [Leedy]’s studio, and my press was pounding day and night. It was loud for everybody. I think that lasted about six months.”

Hammerpress moved across the street into its first studio, at 2009 Baltimore, in 1996. After that, there were stints at 1919 Wyandotte, 1714 Holmes and, until a few months ago, 110 Southwest Boulevard — a location that over the past half-decade came to be synonymous with First Fridays and the Crossroads boom. The shop was attractive to art-school design enthusiasts as it was to casual greeting-card seekers.

Hammerpress opens the doors Friday, March 6, at its new spot, its biggest yet, at 500 Southwest Boulevard (the black, midcentury building across from Rhythm and Booze and adjacent to the no-attendant gas station near the southbound ramp to Interstate 35). Hammerpress is leasing 6,100 square feet, the entire lower level, from the building’s owner, Ryan Gale, who has done contracting work on several Crossroads properties over the years and is a friend of Vest’s. The new headquarters reflects Hammerpress’ growth and its ambitions as a letterpress operation, design studio and retail space.

Ten days out from the opening, everything clacks along in the back of the house. Designers sit before iMacs in an office area, separated from the production and fulfillment areas by a sleek, sliding glass door; on the other, dustier side of the space, Ben Jones, a pressman, stands before a Heidelberg press, doing trial runs for an artfully understated “Happy Birthday” card. Lead, blocks, wood type, and papers of varying thickness are organized on racks, like in a Home Depot aisle. A dog not much larger than a hamster and outfitted in a petite red sweater (“our guard dog,” Vest says) roams the floor.

Up front, things aren’t quite ready for showtime. Greeting cards and postcards, housed in gleaming wooden wall displays, are the only products set up in the retail space of the building, and empty Miller High Life cans are scattered atop a table that, by Friday, will be home to perfect-bound notebooks and chipboard prints. But the appeal and promise of the new HQ are evident.

“It was a big, wide-open space when we moved in — a lot of freedom,” Vest says. “We knocked stuff out, added some walls, expanded the storefront area, added a meeting room. There were a lot of weird workflow inefficiencies in the old space that we had to put up with because there was no other way to arrange things. This has given us a chance to start fresh, to design a space that works now that we have 10 employees instead of three.”

Vest notes that the yellow pine used to make the displays was refinished after being hauled out of the basement of Berlau Paper, a paper vendor in the 1890s building at 15th Street and Walnut. Also, one of the presses in the back — Hammerpress has six now — originally belonged to Schifman Printing Co. Vest purchased it at an auction years ago. “It turns out that Schifman Printing used to be based out of this building,” Vest says.

The coincidences seemed to somehow underscore the ethos of Hammerpress. The press, the wood, the building, the ideas, even the Crossroads neighborhood it calls home: Old and discarded things can become bright and new and beautiful again.

Enthusiasm for letterpress art and design runs parallel to larger trends in art and culture in the digital era. One reaction to art increasingly being created and consumed as zeroes and ones on technological devices: Artists are swinging the pendulum back hard the other way, toward handmade, analog artifacts. The surging popularity of vinyl records is an example. Letterpress art is another. Dig a little, and you’ll find that most artsy major cities in the United States now have a few small letterpress operations cranking out show posters or greeting cards or wedding invitations. Kansas City is home to about a half-dozen, most of which owe a debt of some kind to Hammerpress.

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But when Vest started out, letterpress machines were widely viewed as obsolete junk. KCAI had an old one in its printmaking department, and while in school there (1990–94), he started tinkering with it.

“There were a couple guys in a band called the Coctails who were at the Art Institute when I was there, and they would make all sorts of weird stuff that would kind of accompany their band. They’d silkscreen cloth dolls, some letterpress stuff, or they’d have a zine or hand-printed posters or shirts,” Vest says. “It was this weird mishmash of design and craft. They weren’t taking it too seriously, but it was all really well-made, and the energy of it was inspiring to me. It was a different approach to what you thought you’d be doing in art school, which is, I don’t know, showing your work in fine galleries. It had a sense of commerce to it, but it was also really fun and creative.”

A couple of members of that KCAI crowd — John Upchurch and Matt McClintock — founded Fireproof Press, which relocated to Chicago and became known for letterpress record packaging for such labels as Touch and Go and Thrill Jockey, and for such mid-90s bands as Tortoise, Shellac, Rachel’s and Stereolab. Vest stuck around KC. He bought a letterpress from a guy in Columbia, Missouri, and got to work getting Hammerpress off the ground.

Early on, it was a lot of posters and record packaging for his friends’ bands: Giant’s Chair, Boys Life, the Quitters Club. Over time, he picked up some jobs for local design firms and advertising agencies.

“At the time, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anybody besides me in town doing letterpress stuff,” Vest says. “I’d get work when a design firm wanted a design that felt nicer and different and maybe older-seeming. I could print on thicker papers that other places couldn’t.”

Bob Atkins, who now owns a local commercial letterpress operation called Skylab, started out at Rohner Letterpress in Chicago in 1997. He moved to Kansas City in 2001 and immediately sought out Vest.

“Brady was the first person I met when I came to Kansas City,” Atkins says. “There weren’t that many letterpress operations in the U.S. at that time. Rohrer was more of a big-run commercial type of place, and Brady was more in line with the Hatch [Show Print, a Nashville letterpress design shop that has operated continuously since the 19th century] concert type of stuff. We hung out, and I thought, ‘If everybody in town is like this guy, this is dynamite.’ He just had this friendly, DIY ethic, very open, very passionate about doing good work and getting it out there.”

In the early aughts, Vest moved into the building at 1714 Holmes and embarked on some more experimental publishing projects. “We did four or five book projects, handbound stuff for artists. We did one in association with a gallery show for a Hungarian artist. We did one for a Russell Ferguson exhibition at the Dolphin gallery,” Vest says. “These kind of ridiculously laborious projects that it soon became apparent never had a chance to make any money. I probably wouldn’t try that again, but it was a learning process.”

Vest credits his wife, Lindsay Laricks — now the owner of Little Freshie, the soda shop and espresso bar on the West Side — with helping him scale up Hammerpress.

“I pretty much floundered with Hammerpress, businesswise, from 1994 until I met my wife,” Vest says. “She had experience and insight from working in design firms, and knew about things like trade shows and gift shows and getting your wholesale business going. It was a thing where sometimes you’re looking at a world and you think you see everything, and then somebody guides you a little into another world, and everything kind of changes. I never in a million years thought Hammerpress would be doing greeting cards and making a living at it, and that I’d be enjoying doing it.”

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Laricks worked with Hammerpress for a short period — “That didn’t last long,” Vest says, laughing — after which he hired a former intern, Matt McNary, as his first employee, in 2007.

“Brady has always had this unusual way of looking at the craft of printing,” McNary says. “He takes the basic elements of traditional letterpress printing and then manipulates them in an artful way. There’s sort of a historical, nostalgic, traditional connotation attached to letterpress because it’s an old form. But what Brady does is new and experimental, really. I think when he started out, he didn’t really know how a lot of these designs would turn out. He just played with stuff and ended up with these ornamental, layered designs. He had an idea and tried it out. Sometimes it didn’t work. And then sometimes it worked really well.”

With McNary’s help, Hammerpress set up a website to begin selling its wares online and ramped up its custom business — designing and printing wedding invitations, and corporate work for clients such as ESPN the Magazine, Boulevard and Spin Pizza. For Spin, Vest created a massive stack of letterpress prints, photographs and words that the locally based chain can draw from for wall murals and menus. It makes for an ongoing creative process every time Spin opens a new location. (There are now 10 across the country, with two more on the horizon.)

“We collaborated with Brady because we wanted interesting textures and colors, and we didn’t want it to feel corporate,” says Spin founder Gail Lozoff. “His design aesthetic is basically a part of our toolkit — it’s totally integrated into our brand. We use gift-card carriers he made. We use design elements he created for posters in the lobby. It’s that feeling of legacy, I think, that we like — there’s some history to it. It’s a little raw but it’s also contemporary at the same time.”

Today, Hammerpress’ business comes from a variety of sources: retail (the physical shop, plus online sales); custom design work (three designers are on staff); and wholesaling to print shops, which is its biggest revenue stream. Hammerpress sells its stationery products, greeting cards, prints and postcards to retailers across the country. That includes some heavy hitters. Urban Outfitters has carried its “No whining, no complaining, absolutely no frowning …” and “Happiness will find you” art prints, and Paper Source purchased a line of its stationery.

But Vest says Hammerpress’ bread is buttered mostly on smaller, more regional operations. “Paper Source will reorder the same card for five years and nothing else, which is great,” he says. “But the bulk of our wholesale is smaller shops that reorder a variety of things every month.”

At Oblation Papers & Press, a well-regarded print shop in Portland, Oregon, Hammerpress products are among its best-selling and most consistent lines. Jennifer Rich, owner of Oblation, calls Hammerpress “pioneers of a resurgence in letterpress.”

“They have their own place in the letterpress world, brave and graphically layered — a good antidote to all that pretty floral design out there,” Rich says.

Hammerpress’ reach has recently extended internationally, with distribution in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. “It’s really cool to hear about people seeing our stuff in another country,” Vest says. “That’s a new thing for us.”

True to the spirit of the business, Vest maintains a modest, casual view on how far Hammerpress has come.

“I think, in retrospect, deciding to make a go of it [Hammerpress] was me being a little naïve,” Vest says. “I’m out of school, I have a drive to do this stuff, I’m getting a little money from labels to design records. Then that leads to a weird combination of design jobs, then Payton [Kelly] at Boulevard sees some of my stuff and asks me to work on some weird poster, then that leads to something else, then somebody asks for a wedding-invite design. And so on. I think I thought I could continue to live and work like that, moving from one thing to the next.”

Vest pauses and thinks for a moment. “And I guess I kind of have, in a way.”