Behind the Stationery: Fox and Fallow

Today we’re taking you all the way to Australia to meet Janet from Fox and Fallow! Her bright designs and style reflect her surroundings in Brisbane. Janet shares her schedule for creating new product collections, how she brings each new product to life from design through production, and how her team helps to get it all done and shipped out each day. Take it away, Janet! —Megan Soh

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

From Janet: My background is in graphic design and art direction but after spending 10 years in design studios and advertising I felt like I needed a bit of a change. I really wanted to build my own brand after so many years of building other people’s brands. I fell in love with weddings after designing our own wedding stationery and signs and in 2013 we began creating wedding stationery and signs for couples as a side project. After about a year and a half I really wanted to reach a wider audience and create products of my own. So in 2015 we jumped right into the deep end and we launched our brand at the National Stationery Show in New York in 2015 and haven’t looked back!

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

We’re located in sunny Brisbane, Australia. It’s a fabulous city, the people are laid back, the food and bars are great and we’ve got more sunshine than we can handle! Our style is bright, fun, intricate and we love foil, so most of our paper goods are offset printed and foil stamped. I like to design in collections, releasing 3-4 collections per year, each with a totally different theme and style. This keeps things fresh and interesting and allows us to keep evolving our style each year.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

Our studio is part office, part warehouse. All the design work, invoicing etc. gets done in the office and orders and products are checked, assembled, packaged and shipped out of the warehouse.We make a wide range of paper goods including greeting cards, gift wrap, flat notes, gift tags, prints, journals, notebooks, notepads and calendars.

We also make clipboard packs which are a really fun gift item and we make the clipboards in house, which involves sourcing the wood from a local supplier, laser cutting and engraving them, sanding, riveting and shrink wrapping the whole pack together.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

We take care of the design, quality checking, packaging and assembly but leave the printing to our local and offshore printers. We make most of our products locally in Brisbane or Sydney, but a few products we had to get manufactured offshore to make sure the price points work for our customers.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

I usually start with a double espresso and an attempt to clean out my inbox (which rarely happens)! We’ll get any orders from the previous day and ones that have come in overnight to the team to pick and pack so they’re shipped out ASAP. We try to wrap this up by 2pm so they’re ready to be collected by our couriers. After the orders are done for the day the team often keeps working on quality checking, assembling and packaging products and anything else that needs doing before finishing up around 5pm. If we’ve got a big order to get out, it’s all hands on deck and we’ll do some pretty big hours to get it out in time, but it’s great we can be flexible and have our team take product home to package – which works great! No one wants to be working late in the office right?

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

I’ll usually grab another coffee and get started on artwork, product sourcing, bill-paying and general day-to-day business things. Darrell and I are both night owls, so we usually work pretty late. I wish my days were filled with painting and making new products, but as I’m sure all creative business owners know, the creative part is a tiny sliver of the running-a-small-biz pie.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

I start each collection with a bunch of random thoughts in a notepad file on the computer and on my phone, then I’ll scour Pinterest, Google or books for snippets to create a mood board. I like having the inspiration and colours for each collection all nutted out on a mood board so I can show Darrell and get his thoughts. Once we’re happy with the direction it’s a matter of more research, sketching, scanning, detailed ink sketches, painting, scanning, colouring and refining and deep-etching each element in Photoshop.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

I like painting all artwork as separate components so I can change the colours easily in Photoshop and change the size if needed. If I’m working on custom typography I’ll usually start with sketches and then use a brush pen and ink before I scan each word and vectorize them in Illustrator. I composite all artwork in InDesign and send it off to print for the proofing stage. Once we’ve checked and approved the proofs we wait for the finished goods to arrive.

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

This is the most fun part of what we do and it’s so rewarding when we see our retailers and customers loving our products. We love doing trade shows and pop up events as you really get to see people’s reactions to your products – it’s super valuable having that face-to-face contact. We love it when we meet people who are discovering us for the first time – it makes all the hard work so worthwhile!

Behind the Stationery: Fox & Fallow

All photos by Fox & Fallow.

Want to be featured in the Behind the Stationery column? Reach out to Megan at megan [at] ohsobeautifulpaper [dot] com for more details.

Seasonal Stationery: 2017 Calendars

As we get ready to wrap up the year, I wanted to share at least one round up of beautiful 2017 calendars! I’m not really one for new year’s resolutions, but I always look forward to the optimism of a new year. The promise of a fresh start. A new calendar on the wall and a new date in the top corner. And I don’t know about all of you, but I’m looking forward to waving goodbye to 2016 and welcoming 2017. So let’s get some fresh new calendars on those walls! I’m sharing twelve of my favorites below, but if you’re looking for even more calendar options, you can find 100+ more 2017 calendars in the Market List here!

2017 Calendar Round Up

1. If you’re like me and occasionally forget to turn the page of your monthly calendar, try this tear-away wildflower calendar from Hartland Brooklyn – which you can repurpose as an art print at the end of the year!

2. This amazing 2017 Collaborative Calendar features artwork and words from 14 mothers (and some of my favorite artists), including Liz Libre of Linda & Harriett, Erin Jang of The Indigo Bunting, Meg Gleason of Moglea, Lena Corwin, and Samantha Hahn. All proceeds from the calendar will benefit Room to Grow, an organization dedicated to enriching the lives of babies born into poverty, throughout their first three years of development.

3. I will always say yes to pie. This year’s calendar from Wild Ink Press features twelve illustrations of our favorite pie recipes!

4. I’m absolutely obsessed with this botanical calendar by Esther Clark. Each month features Esther’s calligraphy and beautiful seasonal botanical illustrations, including my beloved hellebores, anemones, peonies, clematis, and more!

5. Beautiful (and colorful!) abstract art prints plus plenty of space to keep track of appointments in this wall calendar from Fine Day Press

6. It really just doesn’t get more classic than this: black text on white paper and gold borders in this desk calendar from Sugar Paper

7. Rifle Paper Co. always produces an amazing selection of calendars – this constellation calendar is my favorite this year!

8. Idlewild Co.’s Ladies of Literature wall calendar features 12 hand painted portraits of notable literary ladies, including Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Emily Bronte, J.K. Rowling, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

9. A year of flowers sounds just about right to me, especially when paired with beautiful photographs by Whimsy and Spice.

10. Need a little extra motivation in your day? Try this copper foil Positivity Calendar from Fox & Fallow!

11. Loving this year’s travel-inspired calendar collaboration between Good on Paper and Jennifer Young Studio. Each page features a beautiful photograph inspired by Jennifer’s travels across the United States, with two months per page and space at the bottom for notes.  

12. With gold foil and a solid brass base, this desk calendar from Blushing Confetti is the perfect way to dress up your office!

p.s. 100+ more 2017 calendars in the Market List right here and twelve awesome 2017 planners and agendas here!

Happy Weekend!

Happy Friday everyone! A huge thanks to Nichole for her AMAZING guest posts on OSBP this week. Tomorrow I’m heading up to New York for the summer NYNOW market. I’m going to try to pop in here once or twice next week, but otherwise be sure to follow me on Instagram to see all my finds from the show.

The Indigo Bunting / Erin Jang via Instagram / Oh So Beautiful Paper

Image by Erin Jang / The Indigo Bunting via Instagram

On a much sadder note, I’ve spent quite a bit of time this week looking at the videos and images coming out of Aleppo, Syria and the situation is absolutely desperate right now. Aleppo is a city of 300,000 people, of which 120,000 are children, and they are suffering more than I can even begin to fathom at the hands of the Syrian government. Ten thousand children have already died in the conflict, from air strikes, starvation, and lack of medicine –4,500 of them from Aleppo alone. The Syrian government continues to drop bombs and chemical weapons on its own people every single day. As a mother, I’m heartbroken by the images of dead and wounded children coming out of Aleppo, but I’m also outraged that the international community has failed to intervene. I’m planning to say a bit more about this as soon as I can gather my thoughts, but in the meantime, please look at the hashtags (here, here, here, and here), read the media reports (the New York Times seems to have the best coverage at the moment), and, if you can, please donate to UNICEF.

On a lighter note, a few links for your weekend:

This week on Oh So Beautiful Paper:

That’s it for us this week! We’ll be back later this afternoon with this week’s cocktail recipe! xoxo

Book Preview: Make & Give

I was absolutely thrilled to receive a review copy of the amazing new book Make & Give by Erin Jang and Steph Hung – I’ve been looking forward to this book for a long time! I’m a longtime fan of Erin’s design work and Steph is an amazingly talented stylist, so you know a collaboration between these two talented ladies was just bound to be good. I also admire Erin’s ability to come up with (and execute!) the most amazing party themes, from birthday parties to baby showers. Erin and Steph designed the book themselves with an emphasis on bright colors and a modern layout – and the results couldn’t be prettier!

Make-and-Give-Cover-OSBP

Make & Give features 35 modern and meaningful craft projects for a variety of everyday occasions – not just birthdays and holidays. I love that the projects can be completed by crafters of all skill levels with commonly used materials! It was hard to pick favorites from the 35 projects, but I really love the Custom Growlers and Progressive Date projects – such fun ideas!

Make-and-Give-Favorite-Supplies2

Make-and-Give-Custom-Growler2Make-and-Give-Custom-Growler3

Make-and-Give-Progressive-Date3Make-and-Give-Progressive-Date4

Make-and-Give-Progressive-Date5Make-and-Give-Progressive-Date6

Make & Give is available now – grab your copy right here!

From Make & Give by Steph Hung and Erin Jang,  © 2014 by Steph Hung and Erin Jang.  © 2014 Photographs by Erin Jang. Reprinted by arrangement with Roost Books, an imprint of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA. www.roostbooks.com

Roost Books sent me a copy of this book for review, but all words and opinions are my own.

Cute Toddler Bedding

We’re getting ready to make some big changes to the nursery: preparation both for a shared nursery after baby no. 2 arrives in September and for Sophie to move to a toddler bed! Sophie isn’t quite ready just yet, but we’re pretty sure she’ll be there in a couple of months so I’ve been keeping an eye on cute toddler bedding in anticipation. Today I thought I’d round up a few of my favorite finds!

Cute Toddler Girl Bedding Round Up by Oh So Beautiful Paper

1. Bonjour! pillow by Erin Jang for Land of Nod (absolutely loving this new capsule collection!); 2. Auggie Pretty with Pink Collection bedding; 3. Farmer’s Market Bedding by Erin Jang for Land of Nod; 4. Colette Bream toddler bedding; 5. + 6. Sundae Best duvet cover and ice cream pillow by Oh Joy for Land of Nod; 7. Ferm Living neon raindrop pillow; 8. Land of Nod Surprise Party Bedding; 9. Dwell Studio galaxy pillow; 10. Ko-ko-ko shop knit cloud pillow

{images via their respective sources}