Our Story

We built the thing we wish our own families had.

Keepsake started in a Brisbane studio and became a way for families to turn the stories worth holding onto into a book they can keep. This is how we got here, and why it matters to us.

Built in Brisbane

Rob & Sasha

Why we started

Some stories only exist in the person who remembers them.

That is the quiet worry that started Keepsake: how much of a family disappears when the person who carries its stories is gone. The recipes, the migration tales, the ordinary days no one thought to write down. We set out to make it easy to sit down, ask the questions, and keep the answers in something you can hold.

That quiet worry started Keepsake: how much of a family disappears when the person who carries its stories is gone. We make it easy to ask the questions and keep the answers in something you can hold.

2021

It started with a studio

We started Halftone, a design and software studio in Brisbane. For three years we built products for other people and got a little obsessive about the details: typography, paper, the feeling of something made well. That same care now goes into every book Keepsake prints.

The studio

Early 2023

We noticed something missing

Working with clients, we kept seeing the same thing in our own families. The people who carried the stories were getting older, and almost none of it had been written down. The recipes, the migration stories, the way a grandparent tells a tale they have told a hundred times. It was quietly disappearing, and no one had made it easy to keep.

Late 2023

Keepsake begins

We started building Keepsake: a way to capture a family's stories while the people who lived them are still here to tell them, then turn those stories into a hardcover book worth passing down. Not a journaling app. A way to write a life, together with the people who matter most.

First sketches

2025

Our first families

We opened Keepsake up to our first families. They wrote alongside parents and grandparents, dug out old photos, and argued warmly over which stories made the cut. Their feedback shaped almost everything: the questions we ask, the way chapters come together, and what a finished book should feel like in your hands.

December 2025

The first book

The first hardcover came off the press. Seeing a family's stories bound, printed, and real changed how we thought about the whole product. A screen can hold a story. A book makes it something you keep on a shelf, lend to a cousin, and read aloud at the dinner table.

Book #1

December 2025

Going global

We started printing in the US, the UK, Canada and Germany. Families are spread across the world now, so it mattered that a daughter in London and her mum in Sydney could each hold the same book, printed close to home and delivered without a small fortune in shipping.

2026

Out into the world

We started showing up in person, at markets and events, with sample books on the table. There is nothing quite like watching someone open one for the first time, go quiet, and immediately start thinking about whose story they would want to keep.

Our first market

In our words

From us to you

Mum & me

A note from Sasha

I call my family most weeks. My mum, my siblings, sometimes just to say nothing much at all. I grew up close to them, and I have never stopped needing that closeness.

For a long time I assumed those calls would always be there. The voices, the in-jokes, the way my mum tells a story she has told a hundred times and somehow makes it new. Then you notice how much of a family lives only in the people who remember it. When they go, it goes with them, unless someone wrote it down.

That is the part of Keepsake I care about most. Not the app, not the features. The fact that one day someone will open a book and hear their mum's voice on the page, exactly as she told it.

We made the thing I wish every family had.

SashaCo-founder, Keepsake

Listening

A note from Robert

I grew up in remote Aboriginal communities. Storytelling there isn't a hobby or a weekend project. It is how knowledge moves, how country is remembered, how you understand who you are and who came before you. You learn early to sit with elders and listen, because what they carry can't be looked up.

I moved out of home at 16. I was in a hurry to get on with life, the way you are at that age. It took me years to realise how much I had walked past: the stories I never asked for, my own family's history, and my own from a time I can barely remember.

You can't get those years back. But you can make it easy for the next person to ask the question before the moment passes. That is what we built. A way to sit down, hit record, and keep the story while the person is still here to tell it.

RobertCo-founder, Keepsake

Stories fade, but Keepsake's last.Save yours today.

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