All About Daisy Lane

The Daisy Lane story began in 1960 when Phil Taylor, a young British artist, settled in Sydney with his Australian wife Mary.  On their kitchen table they set up Phil Taylor Cards, a greeting card company that introduced Phil’s charming images of children to Australia. Almost overnight his images became hugely popular, and throughout the 1960s Phil and Mary encouraged a number of talented young artists to illustrate cards in his style.

Sue Adams, a young Australian artist, joined Phil Taylor and began to make colourful illustrations of chubby-cheeked children in their flower gardens. The ‘cuties’, as Sue’s cards came to be known within the company, were also immensely popular and their illustrative style influenced a whole genre of greeting card illustration throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Many people who grew up in Australia in this period have fond memories of Sue’s cards and the swap cards and stationery products they inspired.

By the mid-1980s, Phil Taylor Cards had grown to become one of the leading greeting card companies in Australia. However, greeting card design had begun to move in a new direction and the ‘cuties’ started to fall out of fashion. Sue Taylor returned to England where she continues to draw and paint, and Phil Taylor Cards is now Australia’s oldest family-owned card company, run today by Phil and Mary’s son Mark.

In 2010 another British-Australian family business which had started life at a kitchen table joined the story. Allison Jones, designer, collector of vintage children’s illustration and founder of gift company Lark, came across a box of Sue Adams ‘cuties’ cards in her local Daylesford junk shop. A child of the 1970s, Allison fell in love with the illustrations and tracked them down to Sydney, where she found that Phil and Mary Taylor have carefully kept thousands of Sue’s original illustrations. Now, in collaboration with the Taylor family, Allison has created Daisy Lane, a celebration of Sue Adams’ work and a collection of beautiful gift and lifestyle products that will grow over the coming years into a major Australian brand, creating memories for a whole new generation of children.