About us
Built by Family. Engineered for Film & TV Production.
Hippo Carts is a family run UK manufacturer specialising in high quality film carts, TV production carts, lighting carts, and bespoke carts built for the realities of professional set life. Born from hands-on industry experience, our business combines precision engineering with practical workflow design to create durable, reliable production carts that crews can depend on.
Founded by Alex Marler Director, CAD designer, engineer, fabricator, and visionary, Hippo Carts is built on over a decade of engineering expertise. Alex’s background in the TV and SFX industry, where he designed and fabricated inventive rigs and filming equipment, gives us genuine insight into what makes a film and TV production cart truly functional. From a simple napkin sketch to a fully realised 3D CAD model, Alex turns ideas into robust, laser-welded solutions built to withstand busy studio floors, demanding location shoots, and constant truck moves.
How Hippo Carts Began
Hippo Carts was born when a friend in the lighting department needed a new folding cart but couldn’t justify the inflated prices charged by existing suppliers. Together, they re-engineered the design, improving durability, layout, and on set efficiency, while keeping costs realistic. The result streamlined his workflow and proved there was room in the market for better built, better priced film and TV carts.
What started as one improved cart quickly grew into a dedicated workshop producing UK-built production carts for lighting, grip, camera, art, sound, and DIT departments.
Alongside Alex is Briony, our Office Manager, website designer, and social media Hippo. Briony manages customer communication, bespoke design coordination, and our online presence, ensuring every enquiry receives a personal, professional response.
A Family Business with Professional Standards
As a small, independent manufacturer, we take genuine pride in every film and TV production cart that leaves our workshop. Our size allows us to remain hands-on, responsive, and detail-focused. We design, fabricate, laser weld, and assemble our carts in house in the UK, producing heavy duty, professional grade solutions we are proud to put our name on.
Whether you need a ready made lighting cart, a modular TV production cart, or a fully bespoke film and Tv production cart built around your specific workflow, we’re here to create a solution that makes life easier on set, just like the very first cart that started it all.
Some of Alex's Film and Tv projects
Alex doesn’t claim to be an expert on life on a TV set, but he’s certainly spent a fair bit of time on one! Over the years, he’s been lucky enough to work on a range of television projects, designing and building robotic components, robots being his other long standing passion.
His work has featured in productions including Man vs Robot, Dinosaur with Stephen Fry, The Gadget Show, the Colin Furze dinosaur pilot show, Sidemen YouTube productions, and even Costa Coffee adverts.
Long before that, Alex also competed in Robot Wars back in the day, where he battled under the robot name “Beast”, a project that still brings back plenty of great memories. He still competes in the live robot show Extreme Robots where he competes with his new robot "The Hippo."
At heart, though, he’s simply someone who loves building things, solving problems, and bringing ideas to life
Design your bespoke cart today
Want to create your own bespoke cart?
Contact us today to book your free design consultation and bring your perfect setup to life.