About
It all began with two words: “a sweet letter.”
Someone very close to me was about to leave for a trip.
They left me a list of things to pass on and take care of. An ordinary list, the kind people write every day. A few tasks, a few reminders, nothing that looked remotely capable of beginning a larger story.
And yet, somewhere among the other items, there were two perfectly innocent words:
“A sweet letter.”
A normal person would probably have taken a sheet of paper, written a few warm sentences, signed their name and considered the task complete.
I am not a normal person.
My name is Mr. Scarlet, and I have a particular condition: my brain can turn the simplest request into a fully fledged project, a product and a potential existential crisis.
So instead of simply writing the letter, I thought:
What if I built an app for sending letters first?
A place where messages would not be dropped into yet another noisy messenger. Where they would not disappear between a shoe advert, a work notification and a video of a cat knocking over a plant.
Somewhere quiet. Private. A little old-fashioned, but without the logistical burden of keeping carrier pigeons.
The plan was simple:
build the app, send one sweet letter through it and return to normal life.
The plan stopped being simple about five minutes later.
Questions began to appear.
How do you make a digital letter feel like an actual letter?
How do you give it weight, character and a moment of anticipation?
How do you let someone choose their paper, place a seal and write something that will not be interrupted by another burst of notifications?
And above all:
How do you build a place where even we cannot read what people write?
That was the beginning of the story of a man who could not complete one simple item on a list without building an entire online platform.
There were late-night sessions at the computer.
There were ideas that looked brilliant at two in the morning and required discreet removal from the project history by nine.
There were new versions, revisions, questions, plot twists and moments when common sense knocked at the door and we pretended no one was home.
Eventually, The Old Letters came into being.
Not another messenger
We did not want to build a place for writing faster.
We wanted to create a place for writing with more care.
No green dots announcing that someone is online.
No pressure to reply immediately.
No meaningful words buried beneath a flood of new messages seconds after they are sent.
A letter can wait.
You can return to it. Read it again after a week, a year, or on a day when you especially need to remember that you truly mattered to someone.
Not everything important should disappear into a stream of notifications.
What you write belongs to you
Every letter is encrypted on the user’s device.
Its contents remain between the sender and the recipient. We do not read private letters. We do not analyse them to serve advertising. We do not build profiles from other people’s emotions.
We do not have the key to that correspondence, and we do not want it.
In a world where almost every moment can be measured, analysed and sold, privacy should not be an extra feature reserved for a more expensive plan.
It should be the foundation.
A small workshop, a big idea
The Old Letters is created by Joanna Szamota Blackgrain Workshop.
A small, independent studio that would rather build one thing properly than rush ten things into the world.
We develop the project step by step. We listen carefully to the people who use it. We fix what does not work, and we do not pretend to be a vast corporation with an army of anonymous departments.
Behind this place are real people, real emotions and one real letter that was only supposed to be a small item on a list.
This is not another place for more messages.
It is a place for words that are meant to stay.
Was that first letter ever sent?
Yes.
A little later than the person who asked for it probably expected.
But an entire app came with it.
Mr. Scarlet · Joanna Szamota Blackgrain Workshop