Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Janna Willoughby-Lohr. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Janna, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.
On January 19th of 2021, I got a call from a company asking if it would be possible to make half a million of our handmade plantable seed bombs…by March. At the time, I had two part-time assistants who each worked 10 hours a week and two young boys at home, one of whom was doing virtual school. While my assistant’s eyes bugged out as she mouthed “Noooo. That’s insane!” at me, I replied, “Define possible…”
We scrambled that same afternoon to create some samples to test our time at making them to get a labor estimate. Then I stayed up almost all night researching material vendors, new equipment costs, staffing agencies, etc to see if I could indeed get the equipment, supplies and people to pull off the impossible. And the more I crunched the numbers, the more possible it became. By Monday I had sent my bid to the client and said a prayer. They replied back right away that they were in and were ready to pay the 50% deposit.
I immediately called my accountant to ask, “Soooooo, how would it affect my taxes if I added $300k to my revenue…this month?” Mind you, although I had employees, my little company was still a sole proprietorship, so $300k was almost 6x the prior year’s revenue…in one job. She said, “Do NOT get any of that money until you convert your company to an LLC!” So I called my lawyer, had her draw up the paperwork, tore ass down to the bank as soon as it went through to open a new account for my LLC…and it was still Monday…just three days after the initial call.
By Tuesday my new LLC and bank account were set up, I had all the equipment and materials I needed to buy in my online carts ready to buy and was waiting on the deposit to clear. By Wednesday morning I had $150K in the bank and had ordered everything. By that afternoon, I had hired a freelance HR manager to handle the hiring, put out the call for work everywhere I could think of and had a meeting with a temp agency to make up the difference.
I immediately promoted my two assistants and we started getting our studio set up to expand. Luckily, the tenants who had been occupying the other storefront space in our building had vacated during 2020 and the space was open! We set up safety measures to keep everyone safe while working in close quarters during COVID and prepared as best we could before the new equipment arrived. The biggest part of the prep work was figuring out how we could make the process as easy and efficient as possible because we needed to be at full production every single day in order to make the deadline.
I started hiring other artists I knew from the community to help be my core team on the “Pulp Crew”. Their job was to create the pulp in our new giant 6 gallon blenders, drain most of the water out and condense it in 5 gallon buckets to be sent upstairs for our “Seed Bomb Crew” to form into the balls. I dubbed my assistant, Ruby, The Pulp Master, and she was head of the crew and she detailed out every step of the process and trained everyone on how to make the pulp in the quickest and best way possible…while also keeping everything safe in the papermaking studio. We were working with lots of high powered blenders and hundreds of gallons of water all day every day and we didn’t want anyone to get electrocuted. Yikes!
My other assistant, Lorrie, became “The Bomb Master” and she ruled the entire crew of dozens of Seed Bombers every day and, most importantly, she got the place up and running at 6:30am every day. She got the first shift of “Seed Bombers” going every day and held it down for me so I could sleep in a little bit and spend a couple hours with my kids in the morning since I was working in the studio well past midnight 7 days a week.
The next integral part of the puzzle was to manage drying the seed bombs. We already had these awesome drying racks for drying prints and we retrofitted them with screen material so they could hold small seed bombs. My clever husband made us these special fan racks that hold two box fans stacked on top of one another so we could actually get airflow to the tops on the racks. It was ingenious.
But managing the drying process was clutch. If they didn’t dry right or fast enough we were going to have a really big problem. We were going to be making between 15-20k of them every single day and they needed to be fully dry before getting packed away in boxes for shipping. We also had to keep all the boxes in the building because they all had to ship at the same time. I chose one member of the Pulp Crew, Hannah, to be “The Dry Master” and to be in charge of managing our 3 drying racks, tracking the counts and packing the boxes when they were fully dry. It was a monumental task and she more than rose to the occasion.
Once we finally had our crew hired and trained and our equipment delivered (about 2 weeks from the day we got the contract), we were off and running! And it was effing terrifying. I literally woke up in the middle of the night with panic attacks every single night for the first month, so afraid that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t make the deadline. But as soon as I got down to the studio in the morning each day (I live upstairs from my studio), I would see Lorrie managing all the “Seed Bombers” and the screens full of perfect (and sometimes not so perfect) little round seed bombs, and I’d go see the “Dry Master” to see how things were drying and where we were on the count, and then I’d head down to the basement to check on the “Pulp Crew” to see how the pulp was flowing. And my day continued like that, over and over, training new people at how to roll faster, helping out where we needed an extra set of hands and solving whatever problems came up, and there WERE always problems!
There was the day that the new huge blenders FINALLY got delivered (10 days later than they were supposed to be) and we got them uncrated and they had been manufactured with the wrong kind of plugs and we couldn’t plug them into the wall! I called my amazing husband, Bryan, who rushed home from work on his lunch break, ran to the hardware store to get replacement plug fittings and he replaced the plugs so we could get to work.
Then there was the day that we overloaded the dryers and 5000 of the seed bombs all started to sprout in less than 12 hours! We scrambled to get them chilled so they would stop growing while we devised a new system for making sure there weren’t too many on the racks and I added yet another dehumidifier to the drying room.
Then we ran out of space to store the boxes of finished ones so we actually cleared out a room in my house upstairs and carted them upstairs to store until shipping day.
Then, towards the end of the job as we hired more people and ramped up production, we started running out of space to dry the seed bombs. First, we rigged a cargo net in the ceiling to hold a couple thousand. But that wasn’t enough. So we started using old silkscreens we had in the building to hold more. But that still wasn’t enough. So my husband came to the rescue again and built us these collapsible drying racks that were each as big as a sheet of plywood and they stacked on top of each other. The last few weeks we were constantly cycling seed bombs in varying levels of dryness to different surfaces all over the building. It was insane but it worked!
Another issue was handling the shipping process. I knew the kind of snafus that had happened in getting our equipment delivered to us and we couldn’t afford even one day late on shipment or losing one box in the mail. So, my husband stepped in again to save the day! He agreed to rent a truck and drive them from Buffalo to Chicago himself to ensure they would be delivered on time.
Running a huge team like this was something I’d always dreamed of doing when I started my company but I’d never had the opportunity to manage more than a few people at a time. Over the course of this job, I added nearly 70 people to my team. And it was such a dream! Being united with that many people, all working together to achieve the impossible was exhilarating! And it was so much fun! We cranked great music, had dance parties, ran contests with prizes to see who could make the most seed bombs in 30 minutes (the record was Michele at 176!).
My absolute favorite part was the diversity of my crew. There were high school kids working their first after-school jobs, retirees who were looking for something fun to keep them busy, and immigrants from all over the world who barely spoke any English. There were artists and musicians who were out of work due to the pandemic. And everyone got along. And, even more important, we didn’t have one case of COVID the entire time and this was during the 3rd wave of the winter 2021. It was unbelievable and I know I had some guardian angels watching over us all and keeping us safe.
On the very last day of production, which was one day before they had to be on the truck heading to Chicago, we still had about 23k to go. If we were going to make it, it was going to be our highest production day of the whole job. My husband took off work to help and he got several of his friends to come after work. I had friends volunteering to come over and bring their kids to help out for a couple hours. We had people sitting on buckets because we ran out of chairs. But finally, at a few minutes before midnight, we made it! I took a video of the last seed bomb being loaded onto the dryer and we prayed they would all be dry enough to pack up in the morning.
It felt like the last night of summer camp as everyone got ready to leave for the night, knowing we would only have a few people from the “Pulp Crew” there in the morning to pack the truck. We grabbed a bunch of dry ones and did a really fun photoshoot surrounded by our months of hard work. Everyone left and we locked up the doors. Said goodbye to everyone whose jobs were done.
The next morning, a couple members of the “Pulp Crew”, Sydney and Alicia, and the “Dry Master”, Hannah, came in to start checking the status of the last batch. We knew there were going to be some that weren’t quite dry so we gathered those together and went at them with every hairdryer we could find to ensure they were dry enough to get packed in a box without sprouting or growing mold. We figured out when was the latest possible hour the truck could arrive at the kitting facility while they were still open and exactly how long it would take to drive there.
We finally got them dry, packed the last few boxes and loaded the truck and my hubby took off at 11am. They needed to be in Chicago by 7pm and he made it with just under 30 minutes to spare!
Taking the risk of doing this job changed my life and my business, forever. It gave me the confidence to be able to scale quickly to handle other large projects but it also showed me just how unprepared I was for having that level of work all the time as my work/life balance went right out the window and I lost about 20 lbs from the stress, lack of time to feed myself and from literally walking my ass off all around the building every day. But most of all, it showed me just how amazing my community is. There were so many people sharing my posts looking for more workers, following along with the story on social media, referring news reporters over to come do a story on this impossible project we were doing. And that through following my dream of wanting to make magical art, I was able to help all the people on my team to support themselves and their families during this time when so many were really struggling to get by. Over the course of this 8-week job, I paid out over $130,000 in wages to people in my community and had so much fun doing it. It was a job of a lifetime and I will remember and cherish those experiences as long as I live.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a poet, musician, visual artist and entrepreneur. My company, Papercraft Miracles, specializes in eco-friendly handmade paper art & gifts. We make magical things from paper that bring meaning to people’s lives. We create specialty handmade papers, exquisite paper flowers, handbound books and plantable seed bombs that grow when planted in the ground. Specializing in custom orders, corporate projects, and sustainable weddings & events, we help our clients find the best way to foster connection and we use our paper to tell their story.
Speaking of stories, Papercraft Miracles has quite the magical story of how it came to be.
It all started way back when I was in college in 2000. I initially went to school to be a poet but as soon as I set foot on the campus at Warren Wilson College there was this amazing creative vibe and so many fun art classes that I just knew I had to do more. When I saw that they had bookbinding and papermaking classes I immediately went to meet with the teacher and she told me that all the intro classes were full but that the class “Artist’s Books & Illustration” had spaces in it and that I would learn all the basics of bookbinding plus the basics of illustration, I jumped at the chance! And that class changed the trajectory of my whole life.
At the end of my freshman year, I met with my advisor and said “these are all the classes I took this year, what major am I working towards??” And he replied, “Those are all electives so…nothing.” And I said, “Well, shit. What am I supposed to do now?” And because he was the best kind of advisor, he said, “Well, what do you WANT to do?”
I told him, “I want to be an artist but I don’t want to be broke. How do I do that?” And he said, “You should do THAT as your major.” And long story short, I did! I made up my own major integrating Entrepreneurial Business and Creative Art together as one major with a concentration on Paper & Book Arts. And I spent the rest of my college career learning how to make money as an artist.
But the journey wasn’t easy.
Three weeks into my junior year, my mom passed away unexpectedly, and all of a sudden I was an instant adult. And then four months after that my dorm burned to the ground with all my stuff in it…on what would have been my mom’s 55th birthday. Seriously. For real. I kept looking around to see who was making a tragic movie about my life.
In circumstances where any one of these things would have been enough to make me quit school and give up my dream, I decided to do the total opposite. I knew my mom would never want me to give up what I love and losing her so young made me realize how short life really is.
I managed to finish school in four years with a 3.9 GPA, despite this extremely traumatic time and it was all due to my art. I found that making and sharing this special art form allowed me to process and heal through my own traumas but also to help other people heal things they were going through. It was during this time that I came up with the idea of Papercraft Miracles, to not only make a living through art, but to use the art I love so much to help bring people together and affect positive change in the world because these “miracles” saved me when I literally had nothing.
I started working on my business plans while I was still in college in 2003 and ran it as a very small side gig for about 10 years. In 2013, after many years of struggle, imposter syndrome and working to keep a roof over my head, I made my business official. In 2016, after I had my first son, I quit my full-time job to be at home with him and work on scaling my company and it took off quickly. Since then, I have built a team of skilled artisans and we have done custom projects for major companies such as Lowe’s, Twitter and Capital One. I now am a mother to three kids (two boys and a girl) and have been perfecting the art of being a mompreneur for almost 8 years.
I won a $25,000 Ignite Buffalo Grant for my company in a sharktank-style pitch competition in 2018, and in 2019 I was named 40-Under-40 for Stationery & Gifts from Stationery Trends Magazine. In 2021, I led a team of 70 people to create half a million plantable seed bombs which were included in biodegradable piñatas as part of Lowe’s Spring Garden Giveaway event all across the US. Also in 2021, I was selected as one of the top four papercrafting artisans in the country to compete on Meet Your Makers Showdown, a crafting competition television show, produced exclusively for discovery+. Hosted by Chrissy Metz and LeAnn Rimes, the show debuted in fall of 2021 and is still streaming on the discovery+ subscription platform. In 2022, I led my team in creating hundreds of paper poppy flowers to be used in the display for a celebration of Andy Warhol’s work at the Aspen Art Museum, in a collaboration with Lunago Diamonds. The flower wall display we made will hopefully become a permanent fixture in the Warhol exhibit at the museum.
I have been performing poetry and music publicly for over 25 years and have shared stages with a wide range of other performers from 10,000 Maniacs to Beats Antique. I have been performing with my band, BloodThirsty Vegans since 2008 where I sing, rap and play the trumpet. We have released two albums and are working on a third. I also perform with another band, Hooked on Casiophonics. In addition, since 2007, I have been working as an editor and layout artist for Earth’s Daughters Magazine– the longest running feminist literary magazine in the country based right here in Buffalo, NY.
In addition, I have a podcast called Reach the Stars Podcast which is a collection of conversations with cool people who do cool things. We bring inspiring stories of persistence, passion and purpose as a way to help others feel connected and learn resiliency skills so they can overcome obstacles on the way to their own dreams.
I am very active in the entrepreneurial leadership space, helping other women to start and grow their own businesses and supporting them through their struggles. I have served two terms on the board and served as chair of the membership committee for the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) Buffalo/Niagara Chapter for several years. I am also a founding member of the Diversity & Inclusion task-force for our chapter, working actively to create a more ethnically and culturally diverse membership and to encourage all women business-owners to be involved in leadership and decision-making for our chapter and beyond.
I love telling stories, connecting with others and using my experiences with trauma in my youth to help others normalize discussions about mental health, healing and self-discovery through the arts. Having been diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s, I have also been active in raising awareness about ADHD in women & girls, especially for mothers, and how it affects so much of our lives to grow up without a diagnosis.
Have you ever had to pivot?
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when so much of the world was uncertain about what the future would hold, I too found myself reevaluating a lot about my life and my business. Prior to the pandemic, the bulk of our business was for weddings and events. Obviously there were no weddings and events happening and our main source of income came to a screeching halt. Being in New York State, we were on total lockdown pretty early on and as an introvert, I found the lack of public connection very tough to deal with. Not to mention that I wasn’t allowed to have my assistant in our studio space due to the state shutdowns and she ended up finding another job. Having worked so hard building momentum for my brand in the 5 years prior, I didn’t want to lose all that energy so I knew I needed to pivot to something different.
Instead of doing crazy discount sales and whatnot to try to sell existing inventory, I started looking around at the world–my family, my friends, my communities–to see what they needed that I might be able to offer. Having founded my business in the face of major life trauma and transitions, I decided to get back to my roots of why I created this business in the first place–to help myself heal by connecting with other people. I saw so many people just starving for a safe way to connect with their friends and family across the world and I immediately shifted my focus back to creating custom gifts as a way to foster connection and communication with others.
I revamped my online ordering system with better options for shipping and curbside pick up and the orders started coming in quickly. My clients were so excited to have a special way to remind their loved ones that they were still there and present in their lives with a special gift that they could enjoy every day for years to come.
It made me feel so good to give people a way to send hope and connection to others and my business thrived. When many businesses were closing up for good, I managed to not only stay open, but to triple my revenue that year. I vowed to keep that focus on communication, connection and storytelling at the heart of everything I do for the rest of my life.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Picking just one aspect about being an artist that is rewarding is especially hard for me because there is so much about it that is amazing. First of all, I get to do what I love every single day. I never get up on Monday morning grumbling that “I HAVE to go to work today!” Instead I say “I GET to go to work today!” which is all I ever wanted from a career.
Secondly, I get to be a part of so many special, important moments for my clients. Helping people to celebrate their big life events is exciting for me, but also helping people to find ways to celebrate during hard times is so vitally important as well. Preserving memories is a big part of what I get to do and that’s a unique kind of legacy that I never expected.
Thirdly, I love that my kids get to see me pursuing my dreams when I go to work. I want them to know that they can find fulfilling work that sustains them.
And lastly, being an artist–particularly when I’m making gallery work or performing poetry and music–allows me to affect positive change in the world. I know the power of a single moment or experience to change someone’s life forever. I strive to intentionally craft those moments, those conversations, that change the way someone thinks, the way they feel, the way they act…forever.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.papercraftmiracles.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/papercraftmiracles
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/papercraftmiracles
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janna-willoughby-lohr/
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/papermiracle
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD-Jz9RgAwJGfd0x_vm-Cwg
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/papercraft-miracles-buffalo
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/papermiracle/ https://www.reachthestarspodcast.com http://www.earthsdaughters.org https://www.instagram.com/mcvendetta5 https://www.instagram.com/bloodthirsty.vegans https://www.bloodthirstyvegans.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Stephen Gabris -ING Photography