We recently connected with Chelsea Ward and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Chelsea , thanks for joining us today. What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made (either in terms of time or money)? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

I would say my best/worst investment was when I purchased my first printer and then continued to buy printers to print my own products.

I was just getting in to turning my art from my travel sketchbooks into prints and developing a line of greeting cards. After researching what was out there, I ended up buying an Epson XP all-in-one printer so I could scan and print everything in-house (aka from my mom’s basement). I didn’t have a big budget at the time with a fledgling stationery business so I was buying heavy cardstock from Michaels with coupons to then cut, score, print and fold into cards, and I used Canson watercolor paper for my prints.

While it was a good investment to get my foot in the door with building a stationery business and learning as I went, I was got set in the mindset of printing from home and thinking it would be the cheaper alternative to outsourcing. For a while, it worked but I was definitely cutting into my profits by not using my time wisely. Time that was spend cutting, scoring and folding cards would have been better spent painting new designs and researching how to wholesale and scale my business.

It took some time to learn this though. 6 years into printing from home I leveled up to a Canon Pixma Pro to improve my print quality and the speediness I could produce all my products. Luckily in 2020 I stumbled onto Paper Camp (the best investment of my career) where I learned how to value my time better and found a manufacturer to outsource nearly all my product manufacturing.

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

I stumbled into the stationery world almost by accident. While in college, I picked up watercoloring while studying abroad in Italy and I never stopped painting. After I graduated and moved to Italy for 2 years, I kept painting while I was living and working in at study abroad center in Tuscany. When I finally came home, I had sketchbooks full of art that I wanted to share, and an empty bank account that needed to be filled somehow.

I bought my first printer/scanner and started turning my sketches into prints and slowly developed greeting cards to go along with them. I was getting asked by family members to create invitations and designs and I started designing more everyday cards and began wholesaling and selling them online.

Now it’s been 12 years since I opened my first online shop and I’m very proud that it’s grown to the size it is now where it’s my main income. I remember at one of my first holiday markets, I was selling my first ever watercolored holiday cards and some linocut printed cards. I met a gal named Janice who loved my cards and predicted one day I would be in Stationery Trends magazine. I kinda thought she was crazy because at the time I was more fixated on doing children’s book illustration. But I kept developing my stationery line and learning to love greeting cards. It took another 7 years but she was right, I finally got a card featured in Stationery Trends magazine.

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

When I was first getting started building my stationery business, Pinterest was barely starting. You had to wait for an invite to make a profile. Blogging was huge and at the time it felt like industry standards and processes were guarded and harder to find online. Let alone knowing what to search for when looking for manufacturers.

These days, it’s SO much easier to find and vet potential manufacturers and suppliers. Attending the first online Paper Camp was a huge investment but one that has had so many long lasting benefits, the main one being that I have an immediate community of fellow paper folks to chat with, ask questions and get advice from. If I had had a community like this when I first started out, I probably would have grown my business a lot faster and effed up a LOT less.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I am a huge introvert. My husband and I both work from home so I can go days without having another conversation with someone outside of our apartment. While I do love and value my time alone in the studio to work and create, I also really love attending and selling at craft markets. They can be absolutely exhausting but it’s so fun to interact with people and see them respond in person to my greeting cards.

Making greeting cards is a bit of a strange job because you never get to see the reaction of the recipient. You hope the the buyer will love it, but you also hope the person they intend to mail it to loves the snail mail surprise even more. It’s also really rewarding and satisfying to fill the hard-to-find card niches… one of my very first “viral” cards was a cactus Hanukkiah Hanukkah card. I thought it was just a good and funny idea at the time but the response from Jewish shoppers was so appreciative. I had no idea there was such a gap of cute Hanukkah cards!

I have since done my best to fill other card gaps with unique watercolor designs. It’s a really rewarding feeling watching someone pick up a card from the card rack and feel seen in a way Hallmark or other big greeting card manufacturers had yet to do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sketchynotions.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sketchynotions/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcARTjE1ZR8Dptdv0bSEEaw
• Other: Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sketchynotions Newsletter: https://us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0323991202788fe77fb14fa16&id=9c0c779fee

Image Credits
All photos taken by me