Farewell Paperie Year-in-Review

Well, gang. It's that time of year again. You know, near the end, when you look back as a small business owner on all the long days and all-nighters. All the stresses over money, travel, business development, web development, social media development, sanity development. You realize you've learned the real life meaning of poopy words like overhead, profit margin, invoicing, quickbooks. Oh, dreaded quickbooks. You have more grey hairs and paper cuts from the past 4 quarters (because that's how you measure time now) than you would have cared for. You don't know how you made it through. You still don't know if you're doing it right. And for the love of god, you don't know why someone didn't warn you before you jumped into this crazy shitshow of a professional path how it would completely dictate your life and the lives of those nearest to you...

Then you put all your awesome snapshots from the year to pretty music, and it turns out YOU'VE HAD THE BEST YEAR OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.


Happy Holidays from Farewell Paperie from jen pham-corbett on Vimeo.

And for some cray cray reason, you can't wait to do it all over again—maybe even better!—next year.

Happy Holidays to all of our clients, retailers, customers, paper friends & family. 

xoxo  
Jen & Lisa

Did We Mention We Moved? Part 2

July 1st, 2012 we officially moved our studio to Seattle Washington. It was an exciting time for us, since we hadn't been in the same city since 2009.

We found an awesome studio south of the city in Georgetown, which is a funky, industrial, artsy part of town. It felt like the perfect spot for our studio and we were lucky enough to find a space in the Old Rainier Beer bottling plant.

We are on the ground level with windows that open right out onto the street. If you look at the above picture, we are 6th window from the left or the window that is in the middle of the red car.



To get the press into our studio, we negotiated having a double door installed into the wall. This is what we found the day we were moving in:

A hole was literally being cut into the wall as we arrived to move the press!

__________________________________________________

 Below is a step-by-step photo timeline that my dad was kind enough to take while the press was being moved into the building:

Here is our press buried in the back of the U-haul

Bill, unearthed

Getting the forklift up to the truck

  

Heading into the building

Going through the halls

 

 See the forklift through the hole in the wall?

Of course, it took us a while to figure out if this was where Bill was going to stay.
Our negotiation faces look intense. 

Success! Decision made. Farewell Paperie officially moved in!

---> Next up, transforming our studio into it's current cute space.

Did we mention we moved?

So, last you heard from us was in March. Whoopsie. Our bad. We had great intentions of writing about getting ready for the National Stationery Show and then blogging about the show, itself, but life kinda got in the way. Did we mention that the Corbetts and Townses decided to move to Seattle?

 

Well, we did... and that's how our blog took the backseat to everything else that was on our plate. So to pick up where we (kind of) left off, here is a quick rendition of the National Stationery Show in picture story-telling format.

**We would have written much more at the time of the show, but since this is a recap and we can't remember that far back, the pictures will have to do. So without further ado:

{NSS 2012 HERE WE COME}

  Flying into San Francisco from Seattle. Pretty rad pic.  

My awesome closet-room at Chateau Corbett. (I actually really liked my cubbie)

  

We worked and worked and worked on getting everything ready for our trip to NYC.

Cards!

 

 Our catalogs crammed into Jen's scooter

 

Prepping our mailers

And then the day came when we headed to New York. 

I'm trying to cram everything into my suitcase.

 

We thought it would be a good idea to pack most of our booth display into our luggage, rather than paying for freight. We later learned it basically cost the same amount, since we had to pay for extra heavy bags. Newbie NSS mistake.

 

Finally in the cab to the airport. It was quite a challenge fitting all of our luggage.

Our digs in New York. We were right down the street from Javits.

We took trains, (no planes) and automobiles to move all of our crap from the hotel to the Javits Center. Cray Cray idea.

This was our booth when we got there. 

And this was our booth after 3 long days of work:

Drumroll.................................................

 

Ta-dah!

Ok. So let's Tarantino-it to show the set-up.

And now here are the purdy detail shots of the booth:

The proud owners of the booth. 

On a fun note, we also met up with some of our tradeshow bootcamp friends! 

Clockwise: Andrienne (dingbat press), Lisa (sapling press), Jodi (paisley tree press), Carrie (anemone letterpress), Amber (flywheel press), Rachel and Jake (pistachio press)

3 LONG days later, we tore our booth down in about a half hour.

 To cut it short, we'll say it was a very successful show for us. We had a blast and can't wait to do it again, next year. Imagine the possibilities.... 

(we had to end on a cheesy note.)

Stay tuned for our post about moving into our new studio in Seattle.
Here is a sneak peek of our new home:

3 months in 5 minutes

Hey there!
LONG time, no chat. We apologize. We really do. We've been up to our ears in paper and we haven't had much time to breathe since the holidays. Yes, for a good 3 months we have been busy, busy bees - Fab.com sales, weddings, graduation announcements, wholesale orders, creating new designs, getting ready for the National Stationery Show.... If it has anything to do with paper, we've been workin' on it and we are sorry for our lack of blogging to keep you in the loop.  So we've finally designed this little post to take you on a journey through the past few months here, at Farewell. Strap in because 3 months is going to fly by in about 5 minutes.

1. Happy Holidays! 

2. Happy New Year!

3. A little lull in the biz after holiday mayhem. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

4. Design Sponge - Hooray! PR! At the end of January our Besties card was featured on Design Sponge. The response we received was cah-razy. (The power of the interwebs and social media still boggle our minds.) We had orders coming in from Japan, Australia and Puerto Rico. We were even published in an Irish teen magazine, thanks to that card.

5. Lisa visits San Fran for a month - Just as that was wrapping up, I flew to San Francisco to spend a month with Jen working side by side on all aspects of the business. It was great actually being in the same city. It was almost like we had a REAL work routine. We'd get up, get ready, scoot to work together on Buddy, the mint green scooter, get our favorite coffee at Coffee Bar (to DIE FOR coffee, btw), blast our little space heaters as we cranked up our computers and would get to work:

 My digs at Chateau Phambett

Is that Knight Rider??

Our fav coffee from coffee bar!

6. Fab.com sale- We worked on a ton of jobs while I was out there including our Fab.com sale! It was a huge success thanks to all of our fans. We sold out of our pants series and gangsta series the first day!

Below are some pics we captured on instagram as we were going through the whole process:

Our babies in the making:

Packing up the orders:

7. Napa and Jelly Belly-. Although we spent most every day in our studio, we gave ourselves one freebie day to do whatever we wanted. So of course, like any rational human being would do, we went to the Jelly Belly factory and then headed to Napa. Somehow I didn't get any pictures while we were in Napa... but I did snag some unsolicited pictures in the Jelly Belly factory. Shhhhh.....

You cant' see it here, but our rental car was a minty green, just like Buddy, the scooter.

 

 

8. Trade Show Bootcamp Seminar - Towards the end of my extended stay, Jen and I traveled down to L.A. for a whole day at Trade Show Bootcamp. It was an amazing experience. We cannot thank these lovely ladies enough for putting together an event that was informative and fun. Get ready NSS 2012, Here comes Farewell Paperie!

{Pictures courtesy of Trade Show Bootcamp and Ian Grant Photography}

It's kind of weird to try and wrap a whole month up in one simple sentence. It was fun and crazy and hard work, but it was a great time. We'll do our best to keep you posted on our trade show set up, the spring weddings, and the overall state of our business. The next couple of months are going to be hectic, so stick along for the ride. It's going to get exciting!