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5 Year Long Craft Project Nearly Bankrupts Company


(Photo: Studio Beshart)

Some offices have “Casual Fridays.” But for five years Studio Beshart— a graphic design studio based in Antwerp, Belgium — put a unique spin on pre-weekend workplace frivolities: “Creative Fridays.” Each week, the studio closed for business on that day so that its employees, and owners, could pursue their personal artistic endeavors.

Unlike often unproductive Casual Fridays, Studio Beshart’s Creative Fridays resulted in an impressive creative achievement: Circus Chapito, a circus made entirely of paper. However, there were also many painful lessons learned along the way.

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

The paper circus is the star of the children’s book, “Welkom in Circus Chapito” (“Welcome to Circus Chapito”), which is filled with photos of this unique big top. Everything — the paper figures, the tents, the lights, the photographs — was done by Studio Beshart employees.

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While Creative Fridays gave birth to “Circus Chapito,” it also kicked off a long and stressful high-wire act that nearly drove Studio Beshart to bankruptcy. “It caused a great deal of trouble along the way,” co-owner Tom Haentjens tells Yahoo Makers, sharing the details of the occasionally fun, but regularly frustrating DIY project:

How Studio Beshart decided to go to the circus

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

In the early days of Creative Fridays, each employee would break off and do their own thing.  But in January of 2009, Tom noticed one of his colleagues drawing, which sparked an idea. “I told her to draw me a set of figures I could use to build a children’s book around,” Tom says.

At that time, Tom and his brother Bob, co-owner of the company, were both keen to do a book. “My daughter was a year old and my brother’s was two years old. We were reading to our daughters. I don’t know how it is in the United States, but in Belgium there are a lot of crappy first-word books. We wanted to make a good first-word book.”

The Characters

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

Circus Chapito began with the drawings from that employee, which Tom would convert into paper animals. “We worked on the animals for two years,” he says.

“Then my brother, who’s a photographer, had the idea to build a huge circus tent out of paper and take pictures of them.”

What’s a circus without a tent?

(Photo: Bored Panda/Studio Beshart)

In 2010 we had this intern come in to start making the tent; eventually, we had interns working full-time on the project.”

To fill the tent beyond the animals, the Beshart team then made a paper audience of 200 people.

Photo Fail?

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

“We had the tents ready at the end of 2011,” says Tom. That’s when the picture-taking began. “We bought a new camera to get the pictures just right,” he said.

Then they hit a snag (spoiler alert: there would be more). “My brother said, ‘I can’t take any decent pictures. We need lights inside the tent.’  So I ordered lights on the Internet.”

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

“It took about 4-6 hours to take each photograph. We needed to get the lighting just right. My brother is a perfectionist,” says Tom. That quest for perfection often meant shooting at night; during the daytime they couldn’t get the studio dark enough to get the conditions Tom’s brother demanded. “Daytime was for the customers, nighttime was for the pictures.”

How long could they hold up?

(Photo: Studio Beshart)


The costs of closing on Fridays, working all night and putting people full-time on the project — not to mention the costs of the equipment and material required to make an entire circus out of paper — took their toll. Tom says he and his brother had some tax trouble and weren’t able to pay themselves salaries in 2012. “We invested a little bit too much money in it,” Tom says of their paper project.

Take Two!

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

In 2013, Tom and crew finished Circus Chapito and obtained a publisher, who enlisted a writer to come up with a story to go along with the painstakingly crafted circus photos. Fortunately, after a year, the writer came back with a story that was wonderful. Unfortunately, Tom says, the writer came back with a story that was a little too wonderful.

“The story is so good, they don’t work with our pictures,” Tom says he and his brother concluded. “We need to retake them.” The publisher balked, saying they couldn’t afford to pay for a redo. So, Tom and his brother took time off from the studio, working `round the clock to re-do the pictures that they’d spent years taking. “By the time we did the second group of pictures, we were facing bankruptcy,” he says.

The Circus Chapito Debuts

(Photo: Studio Beshart)

The book was completed in 2013 and published late last year. The result was mixed. “The press in Belgium ignored it,” says Tom, “which was a shame because we felt we made something special.”

Apparently, so did the people who did buy the book. “We get a lot of good feedback from the kids,” Tom says. “Although it’s a big disaster financially, we never really considered this a profitable endeavor. We wanted to create something pure, something beautiful, for ourselves and for kids to enjoy. And we did.”

(Photo: Facebook/Circus Chapito)

Today, Studio Beshart no longer has scheduled Creative Fridays (instead, they take time off from customer work to pursue their own projects on whatever day they can). But Tom remains a big fan of the concept. “It’s a must, especially in creative professions, where customers have their own ideas about what they want to portray,” says Tom. “You have to have an outlet for yourself.”

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