Did you know I published a book and sold around 350 copies?
10 years ago I graduated together with Lydeke Bosch from HKU (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht). As our product design graduation project, we created the book “Met lupine kun je alles” translated into “With lupins you can do everything.” It was a cookbook with the legume lupin recipes, an alternative to soy.
We built everything from the ground up: branding, design, photography, website, research, and recipe development. This project was also part of the HKU exhibition in Milano. Next to the exhibition, we did a spontaneous intervention with an upside-down garbage bin as a table, self-made lupin bites to share, and we invited people to join our lupin challange. It was a trade, our lupin flour for a recipe and a feature on our website.
When we couldn’t find a publisher, we didn’t wait. We became our own.
Lupinfood was a graduation project that turned into a little start-up with zero budget or funding. For two years, we worked as much as possible at our day jobs to be able to fund our company, while building our brand, reprinting the book, and creating new recipes. But in the end, we shifted our focus to different things in life.
Looking back, it was one of the most rewarding times in my career. Not because we made a lot of money, (spoiler: we did not) but because we created something new and worked for something we believed in. In the end, I got a lot of valuable lessons that I still use today.
