I posted this picture a few years ago with the caption “Sometimes it’s awkward when my Mom asks me how my day was and I tell her I arranged dead leaves into a square. For the internet.”
I was twenty-something with a baby on my hip and a toddler tangled at my feet. The small design studio I had been working for quietly closed its doors the year before. With sporadic projects every couple of months to work on, it had seemed like a good time to maybe pivot to something else. Like so many paper loving designers before me, I had answered the siren song of stationery design and done a stint making custom wedding invitations in college. The timing hadn’t been right (some people are not thrilled when 10,000 envelopes are delivered to campus housing) so I shelved it after a while to focus on freelance work. But it was always in the back of my mind to pick up invitations again at some point. With nap-time-work-hours looking pretty empty and whole rooms I could fill with paper, the timing felt like it could work. I made lists in a notebook for a few days, bought a domain name, and designed my first collection of marginally ok wedding stationery.
A lot of wedding stationery designers share similar origin stories — they were getting married, couldn’t find what they were looking for, decided to make their own invitations, and voila! they were hooked. That’s what happened to me. Wedding invitations are a design trifecta: paper, typography, and details, details, details (stamps! monograms! coordinating insert cards!) It’s hard to resist the lure. The catch is this — it’s a referral heavy business. Momentum builds slowly when it’s an (allegedly) once in a lifetime event you’re selling for. So I did what the internet told me to do when building a business — I joined Instagram.
And that’s how I went from starting a wedding invitation company to placing dead leaves in the shape of a square within a year. Makes perfect sense, right?
To sell on social media you need an audience. I had no audience. To gather an audience you need people who like your work. To find people who like your work you need to post. A lot. I decided to post every day during the afternoon while my two boys napped. It didn’t take long to burn through the small stack of invitation photos I had. I didn’t want to share the same work over and over again (Kate, if you’re reading this, I know), so I started making things just to be able to post and show up. One day I was trying to finish a swashy ‘Spring’ post and knew the minutes and kids would be up before I finished drawing leaves. I ran outside and grabbed a handful of green boxwood to place all over instead. Looking at those shiny little leaves and their shadows and highlights and shapes — who knew my origin story would start with a handful of leaves and a naptime deadline. That’s how the flatlays started. It turned into a daily creative exercise, a tactile sketchbook. I got into a creative flow. Fueled by toaster strudels and half-eaten pb&js, I worked through each naptime and new idea. And I started to pull together a little audience.
The only problem was that the work people were seeing had nothing to do with wedding invitations, or even stationery. They were all flatlays of flowers. I had an audience. But it was the wrong audience. But… I had an audience. So I catered to what I thought they wanted and what Instagram told me they wanted. I stopped posting stationery work and only posted cut up flowers and leaves. People asked for prints of the flowers, so I started selling prints of the flowers. I had a minor identity crisis; wasn’t I supposed to be making wedding invitations? I wasn’t sure what my goal was anymore, but I did really love cutting up flowers. So I kept going.
I thought once I hit 10k followers things would be set — regular orders, consistent income, growth on autopilot. That tiny little k next to your name seemed to hold some kind of magic. I hit ten thousand and then fifteen and the reality was still a trickle of orders if a post did well, sporadic income, and feeling like I was running on a content churning treadmill that was moving faster and faster. Instagram became a machine that needed to be fed constantly. If I didn’t serve up enough new work I would risk falling off the treadmill and never be able to get back on. I would miss my moment.
It was draining. And then paralyzing. My creativity wilted. Every post was a race to beat the amount of likes, comments, and new followers from the last post. It wasn’t about creating anymore, but posting and comparing. The things I made started to be tinged with anxiety, timidly handed over to await their formula driven fate. I tied my creative self esteem to a tiny, soulless heart icon. I had no control over where that would take me.
But there were opportunities too. Around the same time the mental mind games took over, a few people reached out about working together. I started doing creative direction and freelance design again; surface patterns, stationery, flatlay commissions. It felt good to be designing with no expectations to post or sell or babysit my notifications. The days swung back to freelance work, with flowers filling in the gaps. My daily posting went to weekly, then monthly, then scattered throughout the year. I found I like designing wedding invitations for other companies much better than trying to run my own show. I ended up with my dream career in the most roundabout way, it just took a flower-beheading-social-media detour.
And that’s how I got here. To now. To eating a handful of popcorn and staring at my computer surrounded by lists of ideas and plans and moodboards. I’ve been designing (and having more babies) over the last couple of years while some ideas have subconsciously been working themselves out. I keep being pulled back to the flat lays. I feel like there’s something there, so I started writing, which has helped untangle it a little at a time. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something. I guess I have a habit of putting things down and picking them back up again when I can look at them a little closer. I’m finding that life moves in circles, not lines.
There’s a sort of plan, although I do reserve the right to pivot. Mostly I want to make beautiful things because I want to make them, because the ideas won’t let go. I want to have my own space to figure it out. And if I do change directions in the next couple of months or years, I promise to leave all robot algorithms out of that decision.
