Enterprise Nation

Elod Beregszaszi turned a lifelong passion for origami into a living from his "foldaway bedsit" in Hackney. Read on and see how his story unfolds...

Paper dreams

My business came about almost by accident when after being made redundant (from a part-time job in a sweet little bookshop) I chanced on turning a lifelong passion for origami, and all things paper into a way of making a living. It involved a lot of testing to begin with, getting to know suppliers, doing a bit of test marketing for about a year before finally starting out as a sole trader at the end of 2006.

Popupology is the name I chose for the enterprise and I would describe myself as a paper-engineer, designer creating pop-up templates for paper sculptures, cards, window displays and a lot else besides.

My first step was to to launch a small range of origami architecture cards, working from home as a "kitchen table publisher" folding and gluing the designs by hand.

Fold away work-space

I live in a tiny bedsit which means low overheads, but also requires me to literally fold away my live-space to turn it into a work-space during the day, so a lot of my time is spent re-arranging stuff around the flat. It helps that all my work if foldable and so stores away easily, but a little more space wouldn't go amiss.

I have been fortunate in that I get more and more work through referrals, one commission leading to another, but I have also embarked on a hectic social life, meeting as many people as I can, which actually turned out to be the best thing about self-employment. It's a lot of fun and work at the same time. Joining some networks like CIDA (Creative Industries Development Agency) and HBV (Hackney Business Venture) have also proved fruitful and I would recommend it to anyone starting out.

The future

I am currently working on my website, but taking my time over it and hopefully I will have something presentable by the end of the summer.

It's still early days, but response has been encouraging and there is a lot of job satisfaction in making creative projects happen along with some of the headaches and worry about the unforeseen hitches along the way. But all things experimental are leaps into the unknown and the bigger the learning curve the greater the sense of achievement so I have had to accept that making "mistakes" is part of the process. That has been the most valuable lesson so far and it has turned me into an eternal optimist.

I would say that the future looks good as this field is full of potential and has possibilities for exciting applications across a wide range of design and art disciplines and new projects are constantly presenting themselves. The one essential ingredient seems to be collaboration with other specialists, something that also takes care of the isolation of working from home. – Elod Beregszaszi

• Popupology [coming soon]
• Grow Together Group [Elod's Yahoo! Group]