The Brag

We Buy Your Kids
Ka-Ching! Living The Dream
By Jeremy Williams

So many of us wish our hobby could be a self-sustaining career, but so few realise that dream. Well, Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney are living the dream. But when the Newtown-based creative duo started out in 2006, making screen-printed posters for Popfrenzy’s roster of Australian tours, under the design moniker We Buy Your Kids, little did they know that within five years they’d be multimedia artists with a national profile.

“I think that we’ve always tried to push ourselves and keep what we make moving forward, hopefully improving,” says Day, of their trajectory. In his opinion, luck and diversity have been just as important to WBYK’s success as talent. “There’s quite a lot of variety of styles in the work we’ve made over the last five years. I think that plays a part in staying in business, for sure.”

As you might expect, Sonny and Biddy have a partnership based on complementing talents and interests: “Biddy is a fantastic designer, but I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination,” says Day, “but I’ve always liked how words can work with pictures. I really like painting – but screen-printing is close to my heart. I love the process, as stressful as it can sometimes be. Nothing’s better than holding a freshly finished print.”

Their increased profile has afforded Sonny and Biddy the luxury of being a little bit more picky about the projects they take on (another advantage of living the dream, just quietly). “We have to be interested in the project,” Day says simply. “It’s always good to work on something when you and the client can meet in the middle. ‘Where ideas meet’ – sounds like an ad for TeleCafe…”

For Day, the most memorable WBYK collaboration to date was also their least permanent: “We had to paint a mural on a wall made of 110 cases of beer, for a beer launch. We did it in front of an audience (who were simultaneously drinking the beer), then when we finished they pulled it apart and gave everyone at the launch a case. That was weird, seeing this thing we’d worked on for nine hours dismantled in 45 seconds.”

Beverages are also at the centre of WBYK’s most recent collaboration: Schweppes’ Summer Rewind campaign. “We were approached for this job through our agent, and asked if we were keen to make a series of T-shirt graphics for the Schweppes summer campaign,” Day explains, adding that the immense proportions of the project were enough to get their creative juices flowing. “We thought it sounded great – and it’s pretty crazy seeing our name on the side of all these bottles in the supermarket.”

What: Schweppes Summer Rewind
When: Bidding now open to win WBYK’s limited-edition retro tees, in six flavas
More: summerrewind.com.au / wbyk.com.au