As a graphic designer, I have always had a love for stationery and paper goods. I have always felt inspired by the idea that whenever I used an organizational tool that was both well-designed and beautiful, I was more excited to use it and more inclined to stick with using it over time. I also was always enamored with the idea of personalized products. The idea that when something has your name on it, it creates a connection between you and that product. Rather than just being an item that you purchased, it is now something that was intended for you and you only.

As an artist, organization has never come naturally to me. It has always been something I have had to work very hard at. Initially, with my love for all things personalized, I started out designing simple personalized stationery. I loved the idea of handwritten notes and being able to offer beautiful cards that were unique to each person. As I started selling these more and more, I needed a better way to stay organized with this small, little side business that it was becoming. I turned to planners as a resource but found that whenever I would buy one, I would start using it and quickly fall away from the habit. The planners I was finding in the store just didn’t seem to work for my scattered brain. With my love for beautiful paper products and design, I started thinking that it would be wonderful if planners could be more personal to each person. To create different, unique layouts for the different, unique people using them. That is what inspired me to start making planners in a new way than what I had available to me in stores.

The vision of customizable planners has evolved and expanded more than I could have dreamed. I attribute a great deal of this to technology and web development that has allowed us to offer amazing customization tools for our customers to use on our website. We have also been able to streamline our planner-making process with automated systems and equipment. Because of how streamlined our process has become, it makes it easier to continue to add more customization features and has allowed us to be able to truly offer the most customizable planners out there.

I started working on turning Plum Paper into a true company during a time when I was temporarily living in a new city where I knew no one. I was alone every day while my husband was at work. It was winter, turning into spring, and most everything outside was sad and gray. I was trying to come up with a name for this “said” company. With everything brown outside, I looked out my window one day, and the tree just outside of it was beginning to bloom with a beautiful plum-colored flower. This was a new tree to me that I had never seen where I was from. In a time when I was rather lonely, this tree brought new happiness to me and a new life to the season I was entering. I started thinking of the word plum and what it actually means, which is “something superior or very desirable.” I thought that was a perfect description of the paper products that I wanted to make. Paper products that were superior in quality and beautifully desirable to look at. The name just made sense. Superior and desirable paper - otherwise known as “Plum Paper.”

The first “office” for Plum Paper was the 2nd bedroom of my first 2-bedroom apartment. I had my office in the spare bedroom of all the apartments I moved to over the years while following my husband around for his job as a pilot. Once we moved into our new home, I thought my 3 car garage would be a space that I would never grow out of. It seemed like a dream. Within 4 months of moving into the 3-car garage, I was looking for warehouses. Plum Paper moved into a warehouse that I thought was far too big for us but with room to grow. When we first moved in, we only used a fraction of the space. The entire front office was used as my baby’s playroom, and the private office had his crib in it for naps that he never took. I thought we would never need that space for actual work. Before long, we were knocking down the wall to the warehouse next door and bleeding at the seams. We were growing faster than I could keep up with, meanwhile strapping a baby to my chest and chasing a toddler between the printers. It was a beautiful chaos, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Rather than a specific key moment, what I am most proud of is the fact that Plum Paper grew so organically through the love of our customers. I am proud that our customers loved our planners so much that they wanted to share them with others. That defines success for me. That I could make a product that people want to tell others about without getting paid to do it. That they find our planners so helpful to them that they feel the need to share them with their friends so it can help them, too. Sure, there are many things that I could say I achieved over the years of growing this business, but nothing comes close to knowing I created a product that people are drawn to share with the world on their own.

Being a naturally disorganized person is really what drove most of the design process behind Plum Paper planners. Only certain layouts work for my brain and I knew that those same layouts that work for me are not the same layouts that work for someone else. We all have such unique lives and unique ways of thinking. That idea is what drives why we create so many different layouts for our planners. We have done extensive research into the variety of lives that people live, from moms to teachers, to students to working parents, and on and on. We have asked our customers what they are looking for in our planners, and through this research, we have been able to meet the needs of so many different people.

Beyond the layouts are our cover designs. We look at cover designs with the same approach we have for our layouts. We have the most amazing customers, each with beautiful, unique interests and styles of their own. Our entire goal with cover designs is to offer something that can speak to each person ordering a planner. We want our customers to come onto our website and be able to choose a pattern that is just “them.” A pattern that their friend would see on their planner and say, “oh that is so you!” Because our planners are so personal, we believe the pattern should feel personal, too.

I would have to say that our ME Planner layout is my favorite planner layout I have ever created. Not to say that we have not come out with possibly “better” layouts since, but I love this layout for a different reason. I love it because it was the first layout in the planning industry where people could customize a layout with all the different areas of their lives. A mom could use it to juggle her kids, her work, and her home life. Another customer could use it to balance work, medical needs, and wellness goals. Another could use it to stay on top of school classes, their part-time job, and fitness goals. The layout was the first of its kind to allow customers to create a planner that was truly personal to their lives. A place where they could keep everything in one place and feel like they could have a handle on the variety they had to manage in their day. At the time that we came out with this layout, no other planner company had anything like it. I believe it was the beginning of our planners becoming truly the most customizable planners out there, and it opened up a whole new world to us of how much we could really create a line of planners that were unique to each customer who ordered one.

My proudest moment in Plum Paper’s history would have to be when we moved into our first warehouse and were able to have the space and justification for buying our first true printing press. We had been using basic printers for so long, and when we finally were able to get a printer that was literally the length of the entire warehouse, I knew Plum Paper was going to really be something amazing. I had been to print shops so many times through my years as a graphic designer and through starting Plum Paper, but when I had a printer like that of my own, it meant that I could create literally anything my mind could come up with. That was it for me. That was the turning point.