I founded Sharp Type, a New York City type design foundry, with my partnerand Type Director Lucas Sharp, in 2015, launching from a tiny 400 sq ft apartment in Manhattan's bustling Chinatown. Young and scrappy, we poured our excitement into a true labor-of-love "mom and pop" shop. Fast forward to 2024, and we sold nearly our entire library to Monotype, one of the world's largest commercial font businesses.

Let's be clear: Sharp Type remains fully independent, with full ownership in our hands, tasked with rebuilding our font library from scratch. The sale sparked a mix of reactions - many cheered us on, reaching out with congrats and new collab interest; some gave us the side eye; most stayed quiet - but I'm just here to share what fuels our own path.

At Sharp Type, we've always kept our vision simple: chase quality type design relentlessly while encouraging and supporting our team. Our early 'Season One' releases, born from hundreds of hours of hard work and excitement for the craft, drew notice - and clients. We built it, and they did, indeed, come. But building from the ground up has a catch: while those early typefaces were milestones of our grit and vision, over time maintaining them started slowing down our forward momentum. We found ourselves less like designed and builders, and more like archivists, tending to a legacy that, while important, was starting to pull us in a different direction.

It's easy to support the underdog in the indie vs. corporate machine binary. This fits me to a tee. I grew up helping my parents run their retail shops, where they taught me the pride of building something independent. But as you grow a business and a family, your responsibilities and obligations swell too. your role as a business owner shifts. Where we once chased creativity full-time, we were now struggling a growing team and bigger expectations.

When the opportunity came our way, it took some real soul-searching to figure out what was right for us. But here's where we landed: Season One proves we can create good work we're proud of - so why not take the chance to rebuild from scratch? It might sound bold, but that's exactly what motivated us. The idea of shaking things up, channeling that mix of fear and excitement into something fresh, and doing it better this time with everything we've learned gave us the spark we needed. With this in mind, Monotype's proposition was exciting.

Let's be real: owning a type foundry isn't a conventional gig. It lacks the job security of other fields. The indie type scene loves cheering the underdog, but we've come to learn there's always more to the story. And looking at the future, with the threat AI poses to all creative industries, and the weak IP protections in our country (US), there may come a time when the entire independent type scene in the west comes to thank their lucky stars that we have an institution like Monotype around - likely the only one operating at the scale to tackle large legal battles over AI and IP. We have no way of knowing how this will all play out, but one thing is for sure: our industry faces some tough challenges ahead.

It’s been just over a year since the acquisition of Season One’s typefaces, and in the last 18 months, we’ve had a lot of exciting movement at Sharp Type.

We launched our first Season Two typefaces, highlighted by a brand-new website we’d been crafting for three years with our talented lead systems designer, Justin Sloane. With it came Sharp Earth - our most robust typeface yet (topping Sharp Grotesk) - covering Latin, Pan Euro, Thai, Arabic, Devanagari, and even Japanese (developed in-house) after five years of work, plus Lucas’s favorite serif he’s ever drawn, Sharp Serif.

I’ve been able to really focus on strategy again, and take a step back to think about medium and long-term goals to grow Sharp Type and ensure our foundry’s longevity. To our delight, talented type designers worldwide have approached us to publish with Sharp Type since last year’s big news. Our bespoke business is also booming, and we have two incredibly iconic brands we are working with that we can’t wait to announce. Season Two isn’t a sequel - it’s a rebirth.

After a minute in this industry, I’ve seen a lot of different approaches to running a type foundry. Some founders pour their energy into a bold public presence, engaging directly with their audience on social media. Others thrive by pushing free fonts to hook users or rolling out steep discounts to keep momentum.

We’re seeing subscription models pop up more often, as well as platforms to release unfinished work in a semi open-source model. These different moves show every foundry’s got its own hustle - ours included. What’s important to us is to pursue our craft authentically. That’s the only thing that matters. We’ve never been more energized and productive than we are right now, with a packed year ahead - new collabs we’re dying to share, a Volume Two book, some incredible bespoke projects to announce, and more - something to be grateful for after ten years in the trenches. Don’t let fear of scrutiny hold you back - you’ll miss out.