We were lucky to catch up with Justin and Krystal Tordella recently and have shared our conversation below.

Justin and Krystal, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Hi! We are Justin and Krystal, a husband and wife duo that makes up Justin Ryan Books. Justin handles everything involving design and the creative process. If you like how our notebooks look, you can thank him! He’s been a graphic designer for almost 20 years. Having grown up on the east coast it’s very easy to acquire a love for pizza with a new mom and pop place on every corner. In addition to our love for all things pizza, we have been notebook collectors for years, especially pocket sized notebooks. We have a few shelves hanging in our office dedicated specifically for all the ones we’ve collected over time! Combine the two things and we came up with a fun idea to make a pocket sized notebook for pizza reviews. Pocket sized because they’re conveniently sized for on the go to keep in your car or handbag. Any time you try out a new pizza slice you can fill in the prompts on the page to rate the crust, sauce, and overall flavor, etc. It was the first notebook we did and it quickly took off! Since then we have added numerous food, beverage and adventure related notebooks to our shop. I, Krystal, handle assembly of all of our books. I hand make every single one down to the folding, stapling and cutting! We absolutely love what we do and are always brainstorming new ideas to release. We feel like we have a unique product with a large variety, making it easy for everyone to find something that peaks their interest!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

A little about how we began and got to where we are. We’ve both been creatives all along the way. We thrive on taking ideas and putting them into fruition. Justin has been a graphic designer in the music business for his whole adult life and has been lucky to be able to take his passion and skills and make money to support our family at the end of the day. We are so aware that so many people out there work endless hours at jobs that they don’t enjoy and ultimately aren’t doing what they wish they could be doing for a living. We will forever be grateful for the opportunities that have come our way and for the ones we’ve worked day and night to make happen. Twelve years ago our lives changed, as so many parents would agree, when we expanded our family from just the two of us, to three. I took a step back from work and decided it was best for our family to stay home and raise our oldest. Fast forward and we added a spunky 5 year old to the mix! As they were getting older I found myself needing an outlet to break up my routine and feel like I could contribute in more ways. We had this idea of our Pizza Logbook that we had played around with and one day just decided hey let’s buy a paper cutter, a stapler, and a corner rounder and see if we can actually make this! After quite a few changes along the way, we got to one that we loved. We made a handful of them and got lucky that a buddy of ours let us throw some in his shop to see if they’d sell. They did! We overtime made an online store and an etsy shop and orders quickly started coming in. We knew with the success of the Pizza Logbook we needed to keep the momentum going and added more options such as Taco, BBQ and then gradually moved into adventures like our Day Trip and Camping Logbook. Covid was really when things started to get a little wild. With everyone stuck at home, online shopping sales were on the rise. We found ourselves fairly busy and 2020 was really when everything went from a little side hobby to something I can now be doing full time. We try to keep an online presence through our instagram account for Justin Ryan Books where we show behind the scenes videos of some of the process as well as photos highlighting custom notebooks we make for other businesses and artists. We are proud of all the hard work we have put in over the years to keep our little business growing and we’re looking forward to all that is yet to come!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

I love this question because it all boils down to community. Whether it’s our small town where we live or the artist world, we can contribute a lot of our success to them. We live in a small town, Georgetown, that has a very vibrant downtown square. On any given night the streets are filled with people visiting local shops and restaurants. A few of the businesses are return clients of ours that took a chance on us and bought our products to then be sold in their shops. All it took was one shop to say yes to our product! From there, other business owners reached out because they saw a fun product in a shop and wondered how they could get some in theirs as well. In the artist world, everyone is trying to sell their talent and use their creativity to generate an income. We offer custom notebooks so that you can send us your artwork and we can take it and build a notebook out of it. We have had a lot of fun with this aspect of our business because the ideas are endless. We love seeing someones work come to life in the form of something that can then be used on daily basis for note taking, journaling or doodling. The artist community has been so good to us. Through word of mouth and referrals, we have something fun to work on each week! It will always be the absolute best comment we could get when we sit at our desk to start the day and check our email and there is something new in our inbox saying they saw notebooks someone had and they were referred to us. Through them and our local community, they’re keeping us going!

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We sell our products on a few platforms. We have an online shop where you can directly purchase from us. We also have an etsy shop as well. Every business owner that relies on online sales will tell you it’s a struggle to get customers to your webstore. You have to market just right and have all the internet tags and keywords set to bring people to you. In the beginning that was hard for us. We had a product that we thought was fun and unique and if we could get it in front of you to see, most times we would sell well! But if people don’t know about your product, they can’t see it, it’s just going to sit there. We joined etsy for this very reason to take their built in platform of customers and see if that would help generate more sales and it worked! We also use another platform for wholesale orders. If you are a business that would like to carry our products, Faire is a platform built for you. As a business you can make an account and search for products at a discounted wholesale price to purchase and then resell in your retail brick and mortar shop or online store. Combining all these different platforms has been successful for us and keeps us going consistently throughout the year. Etsy may be generating a lot of sales around holidays and then become slower throughout some months so we will push products through our online store more during those times to keep things flowing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.justinryan.store
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/justinryanbooks
• Other: www.etsy.com/shop/justinryanbooks