HIPPIE is a state-of-the-art beamline for Ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (APXPS). The combination of the exceptional performance of the 3 GeV ring with an innovative design of the experimental station results in a beamline which is outstanding not just in a pure electron spectroscopy context, but which also significantly expands the scientific issues that can be addressed. Thus HIPPIE will serve a much wider user community than the traditional electron spectroscopy one. The overarching objective of the HIPPIE beamline is to address the pressure and materials gaps, that is to relax the vacuum constraints, which traditionally have limited the processes and systems possible to study, and to move from model to real – and thereby often much more complicated – materials systems.