Meet the Family Behind Hippo Carts

If you’ve followed Hippo Carts for a while, you’ve probably seen Alex welding in the workshop, Briony attempting to make production carts entertaining on Instagram and, occasionally, a suspiciously enthusiastic Hippo wandering around a trade show.

But we realised we’ve never really introduced ourselves properly.

So, hi. We’re Alex and Briony, husband, wife and the family behind Hippo Carts.

And Hippo Carts didn't actually start with a grand business plan.

It started with engineering, a couple of friends in the film and TV industry, a crochet hook and a slightly unexpected hippo.

Before Hippo Carts

Alex has always been the engineer.

With a background in Product Design, CAD, precision engineering and fabrication, he already owned and ran Marler Engineering Ltd long before Hippo Carts existed.

Briony, meanwhile, was a primary school teacher.

Very different worlds.

In 2023, we had our son. It was a difficult pregnancy, followed by a premature birth and a pretty scary first year as new parents.

During that same period, Marler Engineering Ltd was growing to the point where Alex could no longer manage everything by himself.

Eventually, we made the decision for Briony to leave teaching and join the business.

It gave us the opportunity to work together, but importantly, it also meant shorter and more flexible working days than teaching had allowed, and more time together as a family.

At that point, however, Hippo Carts still didn't exist.

Then someone asked Alex to build a cart…

A friend working in the film and TV industry approached Alex with a problem.

He wanted an affordable folding production cart for his lighting equipment.

Rather than simply building what already existed, they worked together to design something around what he actually needed.

And that became our first Folding Cart.

Then another friend approached Alex.

Could he design a charging cart?

So they worked together and built one.

Then came another request.

And another.

We started to notice something.

There were crew who wanted high quality production carts at sensible prices, but they also wanted more flexibility than many standard carts offered.

They wanted a cart designed around the way they actually worked.

And suddenly, what had started as Alex helping a couple of friends looked like it might be something much bigger.

We realised there was a gap

This is where Alex's existing engineering business gave us a slightly unusual advantage.

Alex wasn't starting from scratch and learning how to manufacture carts.

Designing and making things was already his job.

His background in CAD, engineering and fabrication meant we could design products ourselves, manufacture them in our own workshop and, importantly, modify those designs without the costs and restrictions that can come with large-scale manufacturing.

Want an existing cart with a particular feature added?

We can look at it.

Need something completely bespoke?

We can design it.

Have a problem but don't actually know what the solution looks like yet?

Those are often Alex's favourite conversations.

It meant we could offer something we felt was missing: high quality carts, fair pricing and the ability to genuinely listen to what crew wanted.

There was just one slight problem.

Nobody knew who we were.

Enter Briony…

While Alex concentrated on designing and manufacturing the carts, Briony started figuring out how on earth we were going to tell people about them.

There was no marketing background.

No advertising experience.

And definitely no master plan.

Briony taught herself how to build our website, created the Hippo Carts social media accounts and started trying to introduce a completely unknown company to the very close knit world of film and TV production.

We’re still learning.

We’re still finding our place in the industry.

But slowly, people are beginning to recognise the Hippo.

And our completely different backgrounds have actually turned out to work rather well.

Engineer brain meets Reception teacher brain

If you know Alex, you'll know he's a perfectionist.

Things need to be precise.

If something works well but he thinks he can make it work slightly better, there’s a good chance he’ll redesign it anyway.

It's the engineer brain.

Briony is pretty much the opposite.

Once a Reception teacher, always a Reception teacher.

She’s the creative one who wants things to be fun, engaging and a little bit different, while still being practical.

So Alex designs, engineers and fabricates.

Briony does the marketing, website, accounts, organisation and attempts to make film and lighting carts entertaining on the internet.

Which brings us to the Hippo costume.

Everyone likes to blame Alex for making his wife walk around dressed as a giant Hippo.

We would officially like to clear his name.

It was entirely Briony's idea.

Turns out making a fool of yourself is considerably easier when nobody can actually see your face.

But why Hippo Carts?

This might be our favourite part of the story.

Briony is a huge animal lover. Alex has mostly accepted that this means he comes along for the ride.

Our honeymoon, for example, involved travelling around Borneo looking for orangutans.

While Briony was pregnant with our son, she spent a significant amount of time in hospital.

To keep herself occupied, she taught herself to crochet and started making animals for our son's nursery.

One of those animals was a little crocheted hippo.

One day, Briony was sitting crocheting that hippo while Alex was with her, and the two of us were talking about our ideas for this new film and TV cart business.

We needed a name.

Alex wanted something that represented the products: strong, solid and robust.

Briony looked down.

There was the hippo.

Strong. Robust. Pretty difficult to ignore.

Hippo Carts.

And it stuck.

That little crocheted hippo still exists today.

Although the one you see wandering around trade shows is considerably larger.

MPTS: the moment it started to feel real

One of our proudest moments so far has been exhibiting at MPTS.

Until then, so much of Hippo Carts had happened inside our own workshop or behind a screen.

MPTS gave us the opportunity to put our carts in front of the industry and say:

Here we are. This is what we make. Come and have a look.

People could touch the carts, move them, fold them, inspect the fabrication and ask us questions.

More importantly, we could talk directly to crew.

We came away with feedback, new ideas, new contacts and a much better understanding of what people want from their equipment.

For a small family business trying to find its place within an established industry, it was a pretty big moment.

So, what's the big plan?

We want Hippo Carts to grow.

But perhaps not in the way you'd expect.

We don't dream of becoming a huge, faceless manufacturer producing thousands of identical carts.

The family approach is important to us.

We want to continue being involved in the products that leave our workshop. We want our carts to be designed and fabricated by us, and we want customers to be able to speak to the people actually making their equipment.

But we do have some big ambitions.

One of our goals is to bring our own metal cutting and folding facilities into the Hippo workshop.

That would give us even greater control over manufacturing, help us process orders faster and allow us to continue working hard to keep our prices fair.

Ultimately, we want Hippo Carts to provide for our family.

But we also want to build a business we're proud of.

One where crew can come to us with a problem and say:

“Can you make something that does this?”

And, hopefully, Alex disappears into CAD for a while and comes back with:

“Yep.”

We're only getting started

Hippo Carts has grown from two friends asking Alex to make them something, into a family business designing and manufacturing production carts for people across the film and TV industry.

We're still learning.

We're still developing products.

We're still trying to convince the internet that production carts can be interesting.

And Alex is definitely still tweaking things that Briony thought were already finished.

But we're incredibly excited about where Hippo Carts is going.

So whether you've bought a cart, followed us on Instagram, spoken to us at MPTS, shared one of our posts, given us feedback or simply watched Briony run around dressed as a Hippo…

Thank you for being part of it.

There’s a lot more to come.

Alex, Briony & the Hippo Carts family