Things & Stuff: The Blog of Em & Friends

One of my favorite things about having a card line: I get to invent ways to celebrate important people and events that are under-represented in Mainstream Greeting Card World. 

When I started my business, I tried (but not that hard) to think of a good name. When I didn’t come up with anything I loved (after not that long thinking about it), I decided to just go with my own. “Hey,” I thought, “it worked for Jonathan Adler and Diane von Furstenburg!” I am here to tell you this: I gave myself kind of bad advice. Now that I’m a couple of years into this venture, with the benefit of our old pal hindsight, I now know a lot more about when naming a business after yourself makes sense, and when it might make more sense not to.

For Valentine's Day, I worked with San Francisco ad agency Camp+King to create this insane thing: laser Valentines projected onto the San Francisco fog, in the world's first use of fogcasting. I worked in advertising for many years before starting my own company, and it was really fun and strange to be on the other side as the client. 

July was wholesale gift show season again, and I went to Atlanta, then to my mom’s induction into the Quilting Hall of Fame in Indiana, and to Columbus to visit my friend Allison at Igloo Letterpress, then came back to find out our totes and towels were delayed again.

At the show, we launched our new notepads, stickers, and gift tags, and took a ton of orders for our new totes and towels, which were supposed to arrive from India in late June. (Spoiler alert: this did not happen.) 

Originally, I was planning to write one post recapping 2014. But then I started writing, and it turned out we did a lot of stuff in 2014. Way too much for one post. So I'm posting this recap one quarter at a time. We had a pretty intense year, with a lot of success AND a lot of mistakes, and I think it's important to share stories about both of those things.

I could seriously write a book with all the lessons I learned in 2014. It wouldn't necessarily be a GOOD book, or useful to anyone else yet, but 2014 was nothing if not filled with lessons. Some people might call those lessons "mistakes," but I don't look at it that way. I can't.

Attention People of Los Angeles! We are having our first-ever studio sale on Sunday, December 14th from 1-5pm, and we would love to see you there.

I have a lot of heart for this piece -- it's one of my favorites even though we've recently discontinued it.

Hi guys, Next time you check out our shop, you'll notice something awesome: all our prints, dish towels, tote bags and tiny card sets are CHEAPER! Yep, we've lowered prices on all those things by up to 25%! (I know. That pretty much never happens, right?) But we've made some changes to our production processes, and not to sound like a used car salesman or anything, but we wanted to pass the savings on to you.

I should start this off by noting that the person who inspired this post didn't say her professor gave her crappy advice. I said that. Here's the actual question I got from "Shirley" (not her real name) via email a few weeks ago:

The sweet, bubbly and lovely Jenipher Lyn is a social media friend-turned real life friend (I love those!). She recently wrote and illustrated a book for tween and teen girls, filled with encouraging, loving and important messages...