Our Story
Our father, John Whelan — a mechanical engineer and lifelong Apple computer enthusiast — bought a semi-retirement project in 2000: a little Post Office. We believe it was the tiniest suburban LPO in Australia. It was tucked into King William Road, Hyde Park, less than ten minutes from the Adelaide CBD — a gorgeous little shopping and dining strip. The Post Office itself made only the bare minimum, but John, always ‘an ideas man’, forever looking for problems to solve.
He noticed pretty quickly that customers were bringing in full boxes — sometimes several boxes — of envelopes with hand rubber-stamped logos, hand-addressed, and then had to individually stick stamps too. There had to be a better way for small businesses to do this. Hyppo Envelopes was born, with a simple mission: ‘save you time and money’.
In the lounge room of the family home, surrounded by his beloved Macs and printers, John started offering free graphic design services to businesses and bought high-speed labelling machines to apply stamps sourced from our own Post Office — all under the one business and the same ABN. A genuine value-add for our postal customers.
Word spread. Before long, businesses from all over Australia wanted in, so we took on an extra warehouse — soon filled with more Macs, staff desks, and bigger printing machines. We adopted Japanese RISO printers, known for high-speed single-colour printing. A daily courier came by to collect orders, and before we knew it we’d grown to two courier pickups a day, sending orders Australia-wide. We were growing and starting building a purpose build warehouse to house all our admin and printing functions. John had it painted to match the little spinning wheel of Apple colours. Possibly the prettiest warehouse going!
By 2016, we could see we’d reached our natural ceiling — small businesses were increasingly switching from snail mail to email for invoices and accounts. So we diversified, adding high-quality business stationery: business cards, letterhead, medical referral pads and more. We upgraded our printing equipment to offer a wider range of print finishes, and brought in a guillotine for trimming stationery. Along the way we also worked alongside many other LPOs, helping them offer this same service to their own customers.
In March 2019, our brilliant & inspiring husband & dad passed away. In his honour, the rest of the family took over the reins at Hyppo and kept going. But the numbers told their own story — with stamp prices climbing, we could see the writing on the wall.
We kept our prices low. We absorbed cost after cost. We paid for stamps upfront in good faith, trusting our 7-day accounts would be settled, even as payments were increasingly delayed, small businesses moved away from mail altogether, and we had little room to advertise the service more broadly.
For the past two years we’ve been quietly preparing for this closure, stretching things out as long as we possibly could — because we know we still have a genuinely useful product for small business. With the September 2026 stamp price rise, we’ve finally reached the point where we can no longer absorb both the stamp increases and the envelope, printing, admin and wage costs we’ve kept so low for so long. So, as a family, we’ve made the decision to close the stamped envelope side of Hyppo.
Our little Post Office — which has been such a joy to run, if never quite profitable — will close its doors at 12 noon, Friday 14 August 2026.
Kate & Jeff will continue printing unstamped envelopes and business stationery for the foreseeable future, under the division Hyppo Print.
You can reach them at sales@hyppo.com.au.
We genuinely thank every one of our customers, past and present, for being part of our small family business. We’ve loved serving you, and we wish you all the very best.
Pat, Kate, Gerry, Jane, Mike, Jeff & Tom
7 August 2026