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

Madelyn, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

As a mom of two boys ages 5 and 2 I think about family business a lot. Running your own business means not being able to go home and turn work “off”. It is something you constantly think about, dream about, plan and worry about. In many ways it is like another child. Having come from the field of healthcare prior to opening my own business, I like the flexibility of working when I can in between the kids schedules. I like that I don’t have to ask my boss for time off or compete with others for vacation days. But, unlike when I worked in healthcare, my vacation time is still combined with answering work emails, taking calls, and managing things from afar.

When Covid hit, my wife and I had one son at the time. She is also a small business owner. We had to figure out what we were going to do when everything was shutting down. We decided to go to work. We had to temporarily lay off most of our employees and work the shop ourselves. That meant bringing our then 2.5 year old to work with us. I had a lot of guilt over that at the time. He was in a play pen, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and playing on an iPad while we continued to run our chocolate shop. He was very happy with this situation, but I kept thinking to myself about all the ways this would probably mess him up in adulthood. (Ok, not really, probably, but still…).

I mentioned this one day to a close friend of mine, and they put a totally different perspective in my head. They said “no Maddy, you aren’t screwing him up. He is getting to see both of his parents work hard, face challenges, and problem solve in an absolutely crazy time. You are teaching him what it means to be in family business.”

I took that to heart and it did help ease the guilt I was feeling. Fast forward and now with two kids and 3 small businesses between us, my boys help me run errands on a daily basis. I hope that one day they look back at all we have done together as a family and are proud of that and inspired in one way or another. Family business really means family business. We all work for it and we all gain from it.

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

Hello, my name is Madelyn Posey and I am the owner and printer at Posey Letterpress in Rochester, New York. I am a self proclaimed stationery addict. I design and print custom stationery, wedding invitations, and packaging. Last year, my partner and I purchased an old abandoned building just outside of downtown Rochester and we are in the process of remodeling it for my print and design studio. I own 5 antique presses ranging from1890-1950.

Letterpress printing is the process of pushing the type into the paper with the pressure from the press so you get that debossed texture. I print on cotton paper, (my favorite is handmade paper) and it takes a really nice “bite” when printed. I have an old guillotine paper cutter and I hand mix all my own ink colors. My prints are truly custom from the design to the ink to the printing.

In this fast paced age of email and text, it is so special to still get a nice piece of mail in your mailbox. I like to say “email is good, but letters are better”. Creating one of a kind wedding invitations and stationery is truly my passion. When I work with my clients they all say “I don’t want my wedding invitations to look like everyone else’s. I want something special that represents us as a couple.” Wedding invitations are the first glimpse a couples friends and family will get into the vision of their special day and so I try to create something that doesn’t look like what you’d get from a big box store. Each invitation is really a work of art. And same goes for custom stationery whether it be for an individual or a company, it is something that feels good, looks good, and will really impress the receiver and make that message stand out.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

This was possible for me in two ways. First, my wife is a successful chocolatier in Rochester, and we decided to loan my business $40,000 for start up costs. This is being paid back as a no interest loan, so I am lucky in that sense to have had that start up help. There are a lot of repairs that need to be done on the building we purchased in order to even get my business up and running so this definitely helped with that.

The second loan I was able to secure was a Kiva Loan. I had never heard of this before, but it was an awesome way to get some money for cash flow/savings/emergencies. Kiva is a crowd sourced micro loan where you apply for a loan and they tell you how many people you need to get an initial loan from. I needed 11 people to lend at least $25 each. Once I reached that goal then they made my loan profile page public and it went out for crowd sourcing all over the world. Most people donated $25, but some people loaned more! I got loans from folks in Germany, and Iceland, Hawaii and all over the US. One woman sent me a message saying she loaned to me because her father worked for The New York Times way back when. Others loaned because I was a woman in small business. These loans are only given out if they are 100% funded and I had to do this within 30 days! It was a little nerve-wracking but it was also super cool to see people from my childhood reaching out to support my small business! I posted about it in my social media platforms, reached out to family and friends and made sure to thank each and every individual that loaned! Kiva loans are no interest and they start being paid back within the first 30 days over 36 months. I can’t talk highly enough about the process and ease at getting one of these loans, I just wish more people knew about them! I plan to loan to others in the future that are trying to get started just like me!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

So I was and ICU nurse on a travel assignment in Los Angeles California. I was looking for a way to meet other people and do something creative and I took a letterpress class at the Armory Arts Center in Pasadena. I immediately fell in love with the process. I loved setting type, I loved the smell of the ink, and I loved the instant gratification of how I could make stationery and send it out the same day!

When I moved back home to Rochester, NY I was still working as a nurse and wanted to get into printing again and so I met another local printer and helped out in his shop. A few months later I met my now wife who is a chocolatier. She bought me my first press as a Valentine’s Day gift! A Golding Pearl No. 3 from 1890. It is a beautiful foot powered press, and she thought she could get me to print on it for her chocolate shop!

I later joined a community at Flower City Arts Center where I learned to print on 2 bigger presses that could handle the demands of the chocolate shop. I also started dabbling more into graphic design taking a class in Adobe Illustrator and watched a lot of YouTube videos! I made some wedding invitations mostly for friends and family and then realized I could expand printing from just doing chocolate packaging design into custom tags, invitations, stationery and more! I love to print and I can’t help myself from making things so I thought well, I might as well try and make some money at it!

In the fall before Covid hit I was pregnant with my second son and working per diem as a nurse and printing/working as the graphic designer for the chocolate shop. I decided to take a break from nursing and start focusing more on letterpress and my business. That spring Covid hit and I feel like it was such a blessing that I didn’t have to be working in the ICU while pregnant during Covid. It ended up that I had to go to work at the chocolate shop and save that small business instead. We ended up doing a lot of custom corporate gifts that year combining custom letterpress with the chocolate and letterpress jobs just started to find me.

Fast forward and in September of this past year I went to my first local bridal show. I brought samples of work I had done and I was hoping to book 8 brides. By the end of the show I had 22 appointments with local brides who loved my style! I could not have been happier. I am going to my second bridal show in a couple weeks and I am hoping to continue my momentum with letterpress wedding invitations.

The building we are rehabbing in Rochester will be a boutique print and design studio where brides can come in, sit down, touch the paper and see these cool antique presses and learn about the history and process of letterpress. I’m excited to see where this next chapter takes me, and am so proud to be the lady printer, ink mixer, and stationery addict in Rochester.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.poseyletterpress.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/poseyletterpress
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/poseyletterpress

Image Credits
Hannah Betts Asa Shutts Madelyn Posey