Hoefler&Co sold to Monotype
Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)
Posts: 213
Are we gonna talk about this?
https://www.monotype.com/company/news/monotype-announces-acquisition-iconic-type-foundry-hoeflerco0
Comments
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Would you decline offer from Monotype? But speak honestly.
You'd still have your own skills to make fonts after acquisition.1 -
There can be only one.2
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I can imagine why Jonathan did it. He’s been working his ass off atop a successful NYC design studio going for 32 years. He didn’t have an easier ten or fifteen years as junior/mid/senior designer before he started, he was the founding partner the entire time. That’s brutal. Now he gets to rest.
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Considering the brand's cachet, I'm sure that Monotype's acquisition cost them at least seven figures, if not more. That's a mighty tidy retirement nest egg there.
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The worst part of it all is that the team working at Hoefler&Co. didn't know about the deal until it went public. They found out at the same time as the rest of us. (1)
If Monotype drafted a contract which prevented Jonathan from discussing this with his team prior to the public announcement, then that is extremely shady on Monotype’s part. But if Jonathon willfully accepted those terms then that is extremely disrespectful.
Worst case scenario, there was nothing legally preventing Jonathan from disclosing information to his team but he actively chose not to. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt though and assume he signed a contract from Monotype preventing him from spilling the beans to his team.
All I can think about is how Sara had been working for H&Co for 16 years, and then had to hear this news for the first time the day of.
1. https://twitter.com/szkolny/status/1438488356590166018?s=209 -
I don't see why he did it. Not at all. He could have retired without selling the company, or sold the company to someone else who'd have kept it whole. It frankly makes zero sense to me. Whatever money he got in the sale wasn't enough because what he sold was his legacy.
Hoefler & Co, for good and ill, was much more than your average font foundry. It was an empire. And now it will disappear. The IP is immortal anyway, but most of what he built was the name and the infrastructure which will now just disappear. In time, most people wont even remember that Monotype didn't design those fonts, same as with Helvetica.
All that would be true if he was 80 but make a little bit more sense. At 51, even if he has terminal cancer, I have trouble understanding it.
I never liked the guy or even had much respect for him professionally, but I did think he had more vision than this.
No, I would not sell to Monotype in its current form. If I found myself wanting out, or needing the pay out with no other options, I'd far rather sell the IP to Google Fonts and dissolve the company. I could potentially change my mind if Monotype were to change but as it stands I regard them as an incompetent lumbering giant that survives largely on inertia. Selling to them would completely invalidate everything I worked for (not to mention what Josh Darden worked for). Some things matter more than money.
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@Matthew Smith This is exactly what is in these take-over contracts usually: absolutely don’t tell your employees! And no one is allowed to ever talk about any of this.
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@JoyceKetterer Maybe that was exactly the idea, to make Hoefler & Co as an entity disappear. We sure can make up some reasons why.1
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@kupfers I know better men who have no shame. I can't imagine that the man who did the things we know he did would want to disappear his legacy. I think that either he's dying and this is actually his wife's choice or that he thinks the industry is about to go under and so it doesn't matter. I'm certain he could have found other buyers who'd have paid less up front but given him royalties and retained the brand. Greed isn't even a good explanation because with taxes there's a chance that could have been a better deal over time (especially given that his estate would still get the royalties).1
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From the press release, emphasis mine:
“Nothing’s changing at typography.com, where you’ll still find all 1,113 fonts in the Hoefler&Co library, as well as the cloud.typography webfont service, and all the other resources we’ve created for designers and brands. The H&Co team is staying in place, too, and there are yet more typefaces from us that you can look forward to seeing soon.”
Occam’s Razor would suggest that based on his track record, Jonathan did not suddenly stop knowing his ass from a hole in the wall. He employs hard-working resourceful people who can land comfortably pretty much anywhere (let the poaching begin!) if they choose to leave.
As for Google Fonts, if they’re to buy out anything, I wish it would be the thing calling itself Berthold.
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Because it brings customers with it, the name and much of the infrastructure may be preserved, though probably as if in amber. Monopotype isn't going to rush to create anything to replace it. After all, some vital functions of MyFonts are still being handled through "the old site" which is not just from before they bought it but from before the previous owners bought it.
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@John Butler and @Kpease call me a cynic but I don't believe a word of the press release. And no, I don't agree that myfonts is a precedent. Monotype bought that in order to have a beard. They kept the brand and some measure of separation because they wanted people to be tricked into thinking it was separate (think Instagram and Facebook). Buying a foundry, even one like this, is an entirely different set of motivators.5
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It will be interesting to see where Gotham, Archer etc. land on the MyFonts bestseller chart.
As for the issues of industry and ethics, no comment, there are others better informed and involved than I.
BTW, Shinntype is for sale, Monotype—make me an offer!6 -
Joyce, I’m not informed enough to wager on any particular outcome. If I were forced to wager, I’d ask what became of Linotype’s operation in Germany—how many people are left, is there still a physical office in Bad Homburg with paid employees, etc, and extrapolate that fate to H&Co in however many years. I do imagine that SoHo real estate remains expensive, DiBlasification notwithstanding.
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@JoyceKetterer Oh yeah, my reply was within minutes of John's, and I too am definitely too cynical to believe they'll keep any of the "team" longer than a quarter. But when all they have to do is copy all the fonts to their other platforms, I figure it's the more masks the merrier, and the Hoefler site will appear the same indefinitely.
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@John Butler I was getting at that when I meantioned Helvetica (designed by linotype). I was wrong about Arial and removed that from the post. But also, we're talking about the same entity that put out a press release asserting that Tobias FJ had always been an employee and no one ever had any reason to think otherwise. If the statements in this press release turn out to be true it will be an accident. Does anyone believe the sale requires monotype to protect the brand, ui and staff?1
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@kpease... There's a way in which that's worse. But we shall see1
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Anybody remember what happened to the FontFont brand after the Monotype purchase?1
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Still exists. https://www.fontshop.com/foundries/fontfont
Mind you, there is plenty of indication of slowdown. Several years after the MT acquisition (2017, following acquisition in 2014) the FontShop blog still had a couple of posts a month.
Now they have had three blog posts in the past two years.1 -
@JoyceKetterer it’s possible that he’s Jonathan just wants to move on. Maybe he just wants to relax for the rest of his life and not have to think about an albatross until he dies.
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Helvetica (designed by linotype)
Well that’s one way to put it
In a way, mergers and acquisitions have always been happening plenty in type, much more in metal times than today. I’m wondering if there are any records of what the competitors and workers, or designers, at the time thought of those. @Dan Reynolds, did you come across anything maybe?
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Alas, I haven’t. But employees’ personal views were rarely recorded in those days.
Anecdotally, I only heard one story (from the other side of an acquisition) which happened more recently than the metal type days: At least some of the people who worked at Linotype in the late 1980s were very disappointed when Linotype merged with Hell in 1989, because Linotype had been much more profitable than Hell. Some of what I heard may have just been anger in hindsight, though, since Linotype-Hell failed a few years later and of course the employees did not want to have experienced that.3 -
@James Puckett Albatros? That word implies a failing company. Do you know something I don't about Heofler and Co? Even if it was failing, I've already explained why I don't think waiting to retire specificly addresses selling to MONOTYPE. I am certain he had other options to sell that would have been better in most ways except, perhaps, the up front dollar figure.1
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If I may say, from my opinion, you are missing one basic point here – it's his company. He can obviously sell it to anyone he wants, he can burn it to the ground or give all the fonts for free. From ethical side, Monotype or Google (Fonts), what's the difference really? Monotype is monopolist in one kind of market, while Google is a far more complicated and it's in everyone's life already (in your car, in your house, in your HDD, in your cards, banks, knows your (Iron) maiden's name, phone number...). They all generated capital and they can have (if both sides agree) for money any smaller "rival". Just like it's in any other markets... Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever.
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When Monotype was publicly traded company, before October 2019, much of the positive position on its balance sheet was in “goodwill.” Investopedia defines goodwill thus:
Goodwill is an intangible asset that is associated with the purchase of one company by another. Specifically, goodwill is the portion of the purchase price that is higher than the sum of the net fair value of all of the assets purchased in the acquisition and the liabilities assumed in the process. The value of a company’s brand name, solid customer base . . . and proprietary technology represent some reasons why goodwill exists.It is, in some regards, an accounting sleight of hand. What this meant for Monotype was that it had to survive like a shark, feeding itself by acquiring more goodwill (i.e., companies) every year or so. After Monotype was acquired by HGGC, a mid-range private equity firm, it continued the practice—last year it acquired URW—which would indicate that sales of licenses and custom services (and other savings such as layoffs) were insufficient to show sufficient profitability for a company purchased on debt. So now it's Hoefler & Co. (He’s a smart guy and I’m sure he did well.) How many sizeable fish are left? Morisawa, perhaps?
From my point of view, Monotype is in a kind of straightjacket. I’m sure they know their retail sales and marketing apparatus is deplorable and ineffectual, but to undertake a remake might cost more than they can justify on slender sales in such an insanely overpopulated market. They have a new CEO, who comes from the travel industry, which makes me wonder if they have the expertise to see their way clear. It wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon (not Google) became the buyer of last resort. Ouch!
Sorry to be so depressing!
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If I may say, from my opinion, you are missing one basic point here – it's his company. He can obviously sell it to anyone he wants, he can burn it to the ground or give all the fonts for free.
I don’t think anyone is missing that point: rather, they are making the point that not all those—and numerous other options—are ethically equivalent, either in absolute terms or in the specific conditions of the type industry at this moment.
The ethical aspect of the H&Co sale that bothers me most is the treatment of the employees as assets to be sold. The emetic press release from Monotype states ‘The H&Co team is staying in place...’: a statement that cannot be a known since the members of that team were unaware that they were being sold to Monotype until the announcement was made on Wednesday morning, so were unaware of the changing condition of their employment at the time that press release was written. Will some of them stay? Probably. Will some leave or be laid off in either the short or medium term? Probably. We know what has happened at other foundries swallowed up by Monotype: lots of people leave, those who remain become service providers to Monotype, the independent brands either quickly or slowly are subsumed, and eventually those who remain cease to think of themselves as ITC or Linotype or Bitstream or FontShop and only as Monotype. Hoefler & Co ceased to exist on Wednesday morning. The H&Co employees are now Montype employees, and the ‘team’ as currently constituted only ‘stays in place’ in the sense that their employment contracts oblige them to provide some amount of notice when quitting.
On Wednesday, I saw a number of people expressing relief that at least the H&Co employees still have jobs. They do, for now, but it is not the job they applied for and were hired for, nor for the employer they chose to work for. There are worse things than a period of unemployment—even one under the restrictions of the unethical non-compete clause in H&Co employment contracts—, as many other people who ended up working for Monotype have reported.16 -
Now might be a good time to recommend anyone stuck in a slave state that enforces non-compete clauses simply move to a right-to-work state that doesn’t.2
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PS - I didn't meant to imply that the only choices currently are Monotype and Google fonts, or even that Google fonts is always a choice. I was trying to describe a "doomsday scenario" where those were my only choices and then say essentially "I'd rather make the fonts libre with Google fonts for some money than take a big payout and have it go to Monotype". In both cases the brand would die but the Google scenario would be more on my terms.
I also was trying to clearly say that I think there currently are a lot of other potential options for a company like Hoefler was, especially if the seller is willing to reduce up front compensation in exchange for continuing royalties.
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@John Hudson I've been struggling to find a way to say what I want to say on the point of the treatment of staff. I'm afraid this will sound callous when in my heart my feeling is just the opposite.
My company only exists because Hoefler sued its founder (after firing him) over a font that Hoefler had no legitimate claim to.
If that wasn't enough public evidence of how Hoefler treats staff, all the longer time employees were there when Hoefler claimed that the man he had concisely for years called his business partner had always been an employee, again in order to try and steal successful retail fonts. I wasn't there so I can't say if they were complicate to any of that but they certainly had fair warning they might be next.
Yes, this was wrong but my outrage was maxed out years ago. They knew the risks of working there and most of them are sufficiently talented that they always had, and continue to have, other options.
Maybe I just have compassion fatigue, and I hope I don't regret saying this publicly, but I don't feel like the conversation is complete without it.6 -
I’m not even in the font business, but I must say that my opinion of many of Hoefler’s typefaces fell considerably in 2014 when H&FJ was "rebranded".5
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