We were lucky to catch up with Alyson O’Connor recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alyson, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I have taken so many risks in my business hahaha, and not all have turned out great! I would say the biggest one recently has been launching a wholesale line of greeting cards and gifts. Pre-2020, the majority of our business was designing and printing event invitations and our brick and mortar stationery shop. In the summer of 2020, the building our shop is located in closed down access to the public. With no ability to reopen in-person retail, and no weddings happening, we saw an opportunity to launch the wholesale line we’d been dreaming of for years. Spending so much time creating heirloom, meaningful stationery for life’s biggest events, I wanted to extend that into a greeting card line.

We decided to take a risk and go big with investing in getting our line out there right away. We launched virtually at NY Now in January of 2021, then we joined the GCA (Greeting Card Association) and participated virtually in their trade show, Noted in May. That August we exhibited in-person at NY Now, and we’ve consistently been showing up seasonally at in-person trade shows (even if the previous one didn’t go the way we planned). We’ve also been investing in educational programs like Paper Camp, Creative Powerhouse Society, and Surface Pattern Design Immersion. We were fortunate that we had an existing creative business to back these strategic risks, but when the pandemic forced us to take a hard look at what we wanted our business – and life – to look like going forward, we knew we had to make some big risks to get some big changes. And, so far, this risk is paying off.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a classically trained visual artist specializing in pen and ink illustrations and custom stationery. I went to art school in New York City, and a few years after graduating I moved back to Buffalo to be closer to family. I worked in advertising agencies until 2011, when I turned my side hustle into my full time job. Rust Belt Love Paperie is a boutique design firm specializing in luxury event invitations, stationery and gifts.
In 2015 we had an opportunity to open up a retail space to meet with clients, which we decided to expand into a stationery and card shop. That was when my husband Nick joined the company full time. He is our business manager, as well as running all of our 100 year old letterpresses and does the majority of our printing and production. Our shop is located on Main Street in Downtown Buffalo’s historic Market Arcade Building. We love being able to meet with wedding clients in such a beautiful space, and to offer couples the ability to touch and feel invitation samples before ordering has really been our niche locally. With the specialty printing processes that we offer like letterpress and metallic foil, it’s important for people to be able to see examples and the paper stocks in real life while making their decisions.

On the retail and wholesale side, we always loved the idea of launching a line of cards and gifts, but could never seem to find the time. I’ve always saved cards I’ve been given, and I wanted to design a range that would create that same experience of receiving a something beautiful and special in the mail. In 2021 we launched our line of greeting cards that are their own keepsake, an heirloom of important times, or just a moment someone was thinking of us. Our cards are sentimental, encouraging and empathetic, with messages that speak the feelings we often aren’t able to put into words ourselves.

We’re currently in the process of building a new production space that will house all of our letterpresses (we have 5 in total!) and I’m just starting to dip my toes into the world of art licensing and surface pattern design. I think the best part of owning a creative business is the ability to make it whatever you want, and the worst part of owning a creative business is the fear of making the wrong decisions! But we are so grateful for all of the support we have from our customers, our friends, and our family.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The “starving artist” myth was a hard one to unlearn. Even though I was surrounded by supportive friends and family, the idea that I would never be able to fully support myself in a creative career was always just assumed and accepted. Even once I could prove I could support myself, and my family, unlearning limiting beliefs is a constant, regular practice for me. The day I realized the only limit to my success was the barrier I put in my own way was extremely liberating for me. Even with constant work, I still find myself putting stumbling blocks in my own way by accepting other peoples’ ideas about what an artist is and is not capable of. But every time I do the work to overcome these limitations I find my own life growing and expanding to fit the new ideas I get to decide about my own life. And that’s really cool.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Okay, so I’m old enough, and I’ve been doing this long enough, that social media wasn’t really the community it is today when I first started. If you go back far enough in my Instagram feed, it’s all heavily filtered baby and dog and food pictures hahaha. So I am grateful for the community I’ve found on social media, that has introduced me to so many resources available to working artists today. The first one that I found pretty early, but waited way too long to join, was Proof to Product. Katie Hunt has built a library of amazing resources, free and paid. From her podcast, to her Paper Camp class, to her Labs community, and now the Advisory Board coaching program I’m currently enrolled in. Anyone building a product based business needs to run, not walk, to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge available here.
The second is the Greeting Card Association of America. Obviously this is specifically for greeting card makers, but this wonderful group of humans, ranging from multimillion dollar companies to micro solopreneurs, make this the loveliest, most giving and supportive community I’ve ever been a part of.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rustbeltlove.com
• Instagram: @rblpaperie, @rustbeltlove
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/rustbeltlove

Image Credits
Jay Ballesteros Erica Eichelkraut, City Lights Studio