logo of HiH Retrofonts, microfoundry specializing in historical display fonts


HiH Retrofonts of New Britain, Connecticut, USA
Serving six continents from the Hardware City




title: The Valley

New Britain, CT, USA

We recently moved from Naugatuck to New Britain. New Britain is a small city, lying in the historic heart of industrial Connecticut. Headquarters for Stanley Tools and Stanley Hardware, the Hardware City, symbolized by the beehive, was once one of the busiest manufacturing cities in New England. Fafnir bearings, Corbin locks, and Russwin hardware were made here, as were spurs, stirrups and bridles by North & Judd. Five panels of Thomas Hart Benton's The Arts of Life in America are on display at the recently enlarged New Britain Museum of Art, considered by some one of the finer small museums in the United States.

It certainly sounds grandiose for a tiny little business like ours to say that we serve six continents, but it is true. We have customers on every continent except Antarctica. Of course, our degree of market penetration is a little thin in areas like Nepal (read "non-existent"), but we have those "high, apple-pie-in-the-sky" hopes. The amazing thing is that via the power of the world wide web, we reach customers in 78 nations. They are Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia,Australia, Austria, The Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Guadeloupe, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, The Netherlands, The Netherland Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe.. More than a quarter of our business comes from countries other than our own. I don't know about you, but I am continually amazed when I look over the list.

If you follow the financial media at all, you are no doubt familiar with with the term Emerging Markets. It is in these markets that we see much of the expansion of our customer base. In recognition of this growth, we will continue to add to our list of multi-lingual (ML)fonts, both new and re-releases of older fonts. All the new and re-released fonts cover Baltic, Turkish and Eastern Europe code pages in addition to the usual Western Europe. All are offered in OpenType format. It is truly awesome to contemplate being only a click away from hundreds of millions of people all around the world.