We were lucky to catch up with Stacy Clark and Jayne Alfieri recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stacy and Jayne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

When we adopted daughters months apart, we leaned on each other. Even though we were already moms, adoption was its own unique parenting journey of beautiful and difficult moments, and we quickly realized this path to and through parenthood needed a special kind of support. When our friends started buying generic greeting cards, crossing out the words and writing in expressions unique to the adoption experience, we saw an unmet need. Already creatives in our professional lives, we wondered if we could use our skillsets to create a line of greeting cards for comforting and celebrating the emotions and milestones of adoption. The more we delved into the idea, the more we realized we were not merely creating cards, we were uplifting and illuminating a conversation, one having a personal connection to 100 million Americans. At our first focus group, the executive director of a leading adoption agency poignantly validated the need was real and went on to buy 1,000 cards, simply from concept sketches. As we built our line of more than 100+ card designs, we loved bringing empathy into existence with our gentle, emotive illustrations. Each time we received an email, note or social post comment thanking us for putting what needed to be said into words in a way no one else had done, we knew ours was a worthwhile endeavor for bringing empathy, understanding and connection to the hope, loss and love of adoption.

Tiny Type Studios, founded by Jayne Alfieri and Stacy Clark, is the creator of Adoptionly Yours®, the first line of illustrated greeting cards for adoption. As mothers who have adopted children, we know adoption is a beautiful and difficult journey. We understand the heartache of the loss, the challenge of the waiting, and the joy of the togetherness at a deep level, and we create expressions that speak to the emotions and milestones unique to the adoption experience, especially the ones often missed or misunderstood. As professional ad creatives, our expertise is in graphic design, illustration and storytelling, and we translated those skills into creating simple, charming greeting cards fostering tiny moments of big connection. Our buyers need the right words to say in the fragile moments of goodbye and in the joyful moments of celebration. Oftentimes our friend and family buyers, looking to support a birth mother or adopting family, are encountering adoption for the first time, and our cards help guide them in what to say and when. With more than 100+ card designs our mission is to bring empathy and understanding to all hearts of the adoption triad, while uplifting and celebrating the love of adoption in the world.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Decades ago, we met for the first time when Jayne was a graphic designer and Stacy was a copywriter, and we were teamed up on an advertising project for the Home Shopping Network. While we would cross paths as creative colleagues in the years to follow, it was not until we coincidentally adopted daughters months apart that we became friends, and then cofounders. As grateful, sleep-deprived moms, we would meet in coffee shops sharing our quiet hopes, griefs and joys, giving each other the grace of understanding, compassion and connection. In time we began to wonder if others traveling the adoption journey might need what we had found. Around this time, Stacy started teaching a memoir class, and Jayne attended with only a little arm twisting because she was a Ringling College of Art and Design-educated illustrator and did not think of herself as a writer. But because art is storytelling too, one day Jayne brought in a small, soft-hued drawing of a mother kneeling down to hug a child on top of the world beneath a starry sky. She asked Stacy to give her a line to go with the drawing, and Stacy said, “In this great wide world, we found us.” Both of us realized this was the story of adoption. Before long, those coffee shop meetings were filled with napkin doodles of card concepts and the Adoptionly Yours card line was born. And, that gentle, evocative illustration of finding each other in the world became our first adoption greeting card.