We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karen Martinez. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karen below.

Karen , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

When I first started Fioribelle back in 2013 I sold handmade paper flowers for weddings and special events. Crepe Paper Flowers was how my “love affair” with paper started. Fast-forward almost 10 years later and my business looks completely different after a few changes I made along the way.

Handmade paper flowers are a labor of love. They are very beautiful, and very time-intensive. When I first opened my virtual doors I was still working a corporate job and Fioribelle was a side hustle. I sold exclusively on Etsy and taught myself to make dozens of different flower types and started catering to the wedding industry. From there, I re-ignited my love for calligraphy and dainty hand-writing and started adding envelope addressing and signage design services to some of my existing wedding clients that had come to me for the flowers.

Fast-forward to 2020, the pandemic hit and weddings came to a full stop. I used this time to leverage my lettering, design and illustration skills and started working on a stationery and gifts line that quickly turned into my first 50 skus. stickers, greeting cards and art prints were born! – I started looking into wholesale marketplaces and opened un my very own website for the first time. With holidays, birthdays and other special everyday occasions, my line kept growing and I was learning more about printing methods, buying in bulk and selling to retailers online. Wholesale was a major turning point for me and my business and only 2 years later I am stocked in over 300 stores accross the country. With weddings coming back, I used my newly found experience in designing and printing paper goods and now I also design wedding invitations for dozens of couples every year.

My handmade paper flowers will always hold a special place in my heart. But once I realized they would never allow me to scale my business to it’s full potential, it was time to let them go. Instead, I chose to focus on making weddings special, in a different way, and bringing that excitement that only wedding paper goods can bring to every day stationery and gifts.

Karen , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started Fioribelle as a wedding industry focused business. My love for weddings started back in 2012 when I was planning my own and It has stuck with me ever since. I wanted to create one-of-a-kind paper goods for weddings and when I decided to expand my line I wanted to be sure to still capture that magic that only wedding invitations can deliver.

The feeling of the high-quality paper, the excitement about seeing a beautifully designed invitation. Those were things I wanted to bring into everyday celebrations. All of my stationery and gifts are based on that feeling. They are designed with that type of joy in mind.

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

Growing up I was taught that my goal in life was to attend a “good” school, get a “good” degree and get a “good” job. That was really the only option I was presented with and while I appreciate everything my parents did for me and everything I did learn at that school/degree/job, I realized later in life that there were other options for me and so I decided to follow my passion and open my first online shop after working as an engineer for 5 years. At first it was a hobby, then it turned into supplemental income. It slowly became all I could think about while at my actual job and I really saw a lot of potential in actually making a living doing something other than what I went to school for.

A few years later I had my first daughter and it was the perfect opportunity to turn my side-hustle into my dream job. I took an extended maternity leave to care for my newborn baby (obviously) but also without the pressure of a 9-5, I let my creativity bloom and saw a clearer path to leaving my corporate job and replacing its income by working for myself.

The lesson here is that there’s more than one way to be successful at life, and that it takes courage to leave a life-long plan behind and replace it with one that makes you happier. In the end, perseverance, hard work and all the other principles that are not really taught in school are what will help you get to where you want to be.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I chose this question because I feel like I have covered it in basically all of my answers so far :)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fioribelle.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/fioribelle

Image Credits
Jessica Fredericks Photography