Melbourne brands Kip & Co and Robert Gordon collaborate on a ceramics collection

In the 1990s in Melbourne’s undulating outer-eastern suburbs, a second-generation potter was teaching his craft to his children. Three of them would one day go on to take over the family business, which was, and still is, one of Australia’s best-known and loved homewares brands – Robert Gordon.

At the same time, two sisters were growing up in a similarly creative household not too far away, and even attended the same, close-knit high school as Gordon’s two daughters Kate and Hannah. 

The sisters were Kate Heppell and Hayley Pannekoecke – two of the women behind cult bedding-turned-lifestyle brand Kip & Co. 

“We were in all different year levels, but all knew each other because it’s a really tiny school,” Heppell says. 

The two Kates kept in touch over the years – with Gordon writing to Heppell after seeing her home featured in The Design Files. 

“I said, ‘your house is incredible; in a sea of beige, it’s amazing to see so much colour’,” Robert Gordon creative director Kate Gordon says. 

“I watched them all the time, and I remember going to a trade fair and seeing their stuff and just being so amazed at how confident they were to see a hole in the market and come out with a whole new product.

“One day, I was like ‘we should make some pots for you’.” 

Since its inception in 2012, Kip & Co – which Heppell and Pannekoecke run with their friend Alex McCabe – has moved from bedding and linen into apparel, homewares and now tableware. And there was no one better to help them bring a collection of ceramics to life than their childhood friends, the Gordons.  

Three of Robert Gordon’s four children – Bobby, Hannah and Kate Gordon – are now all directors at the pottery, with Bobby and Hannah also working as general managers and Kate working as the brand’s creative director. 

“They are such a beautiful family. Kate was three years older than me at school, but I have beautiful memories of her being that older girl at school and admiring her back then,” Heppell says. “They were definitely the obvious choice for us to collaborate with on a ceramics collection because of the beautiful friendship we’d had back in the ’90s at school together.”

The Kip & Co x Robert Gordon collection includes plates, bowls, mugs and servingware and is everything you would expect from both brands – beautifully crafted pottery from Robert Gordon, which is sleek yet solid, and fun, bold prints in vibrant colours from Kip & Co. 

“The main message we’ve heard quite repeatedly is that it’s really different from the rest of the market, which is all really beautiful, but it’s very tonal and – not in a negative way – but quite plain,” Heppell says. 

Along with the everyday range of tableware, Gordon and the Kip & Co team created a collection of limited edition vases in the Robert Gordon pottery in Packenham. 

Each vase was hand-poured by Gordon from specially coloured slip made from NSW clay. The moulds used are vintage Robert Gordon moulds from the 1980s. 

Gordon says there has been a resurgence in the desire for handmade pottery in the past five years, with the previous appetite for factory-produced “perfection” waning. 

“I think there is a nostalgia for things that look like they’ve been touched by hand rather than being mass-produced,” she says.

Collaborations are not foreign to either team – both companies routinely work with other designers, makers, artists – even writers – to create unique collections. 

Kip & Co have worked on collections with Volley sneakers, Milton & King wallpaper and Frank Green reusable cups, to name a few. And, they have another rather big one coming up to coincide with their 10-year anniversary this year – with the trio’s artistic idol Ken Done. 

“Artistically, he is who the three of us think is so fantastic and so iconically Australian,” Heppell says. “We all have such strong, nostalgic memories of his art.

“The most important thing we get out of collaborations is working with other specialists – we don’t try to be the specialist in every area.”

Robert Gordon has worked with artist David Bromley, homewares brand Jumbled and children’s book author and illustrator Alison Lester – and they have another collection with Kip & Co in the works, too. 

“The people that we work with do have to have similar values to what we have. A lot of honesty and transparency is involved, not big, massive egos and just a love of making product,” she says. 

It’s this way of working that seems to bring the creatives behind the two brands together even more so than their shared history. Heppell says she thinks the Gordons and the Kip & Co team came to the collaboration with a “generous spirit” and a genuine desire to create something people could both afford and be proud to have in their homes. 

“Their parents feel like they were cut from a similar cloth to our parents. I can just see it in how they run their business,” she says. “I think family really is at the root of both of our brands.

“There’s three siblings running their business, and there are two siblings running ours – it’s not really a business structure that many people find easy.”

For Gordon, the key is not just family but the dedicated staff who work with them. 

“Our team is the reason we have such longevity. They’re an incredible bunch of people,” Gordon says.

“There’s a sense of responsibility to take over from what our parents have done for so long as well and to keep it going. We are very passionate about what we do, and we love it. We understand how special it is.”