About Us

We found matchbox art the way most people do. Scrolling through Pinterest late at night, one image leads to another, and suddenly you're looking at something you can't quite explain.

Small paper labels, the size of a stamp. Printed in Japan somewhere between the 1910s and 1940s. Bold flat colour, strong shapes, subjects ranging from octopuses to jazz bars to Mount Fuji. Commercial illustrations made for matchboxes that were meant to be used and thrown away.

We kept looking. Then we started researching. Then it became a bit of an obsession.

Cool Prints is a father and son project. We're based in Australia. Neither of us had a background in art or printing before this, we just couldn't believe that designs this good had basically disappeared from the world, and that nobody was making them available as wall art.

So we figured out how to do it ourselves.

The restoration side took longer than expected. Original labels are old, some over a hundred years, and they show it. Age damage, fading, wear. Getting a label from a low-resolution archive scan or a physical piece to something print-ready takes real work. We do each design individually. Some take a few hours. Some take considerably longer. We're not running them through a batch process.

The prints are on premium matte paper. We chose it because it holds fine line detail and flat colour better than most alternatives, which matters for this kind of art.

Most of the designs in our collection genuinely don't exist anywhere else online. That's part of what got us started, and it's still what drives us to keep finding new ones.

If you have questions about a piece or want to know more about where a particular design comes from, get in touch. We're happy to talk about it.