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00:00:01
Elizabeth Rees
55 Plays6 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Elizabeth Rees.
To keep up with or connect with Elizabeth:
✨Chasing Paper’s Instagram: @chasingpaper
✨Chasing Paper’s Website: https://chasingpaper.com/
✨ Buy her book, Wall Flowers: A Love Letter to Wallpaper https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Wall-Flowers/Elizabeth-Rees/9781423667919
✨Elizabeth’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-rees-47953610/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction of Elizabeth Reese and Chasing Paper
00:00:03
Speaker
Elizabeth, hi. Hi, thank you so much for having me. am so happy to have you. And I have to mention, since this is just going to probably be audio, you have some incredible wallpaper behind you. So everyone picture that as Elizabeth is talking. I do. i We just opened a new little office this past summer. And so it was just such a fun moment to finally get to have like all of my wallpaper and art and fabric dreams come true. i Imagine, for folks who don't know you, can you say who you are and what you do?
00:00:33
Speaker
Yes, my name is Elizabeth Reese. I'm the founder of Chasing Paper. We are a wall coverings and wall decor e-com store. We've been around for about 13 years and just been in a really big growth mode in the last couple of years and have a lot of exciting things coming down the pike. So it's been an exciting time at Chasing Paper.
Career Journey to National Geographic
00:00:54
Speaker
How did you end up here before you founded it? What was your career journey like? you I want the whole story. Yeah, it's funny. I went to college at Indiana University and I was a journalism major. And I always, since the time I was really small, I loved to write. loved storytelling. that Those were always like my best subjects in school. But I wasn't really sure, like being an actual journalist wasn't that alluring to me. But my school had a fantastic journalism school. And so I just went down that path, not really sure where it would take me. And after I graduated, I actually worked. I moved to Washington, D.C. and worked at National Geographic, which For all intents and purposes, from going to journalism school to National Geographic, people were like, oh my God, you've done it. There's not more an esteemed publishing house, maybe that one that has like such heritage and legacy, except I didn't do any writing there. I was not like doing any journalism or writing. I was a matchmaker, finding corporate sponsors for our linguists, anthropologists, photographers, different things. Obviously, I was like very low on the totem pole. It's a really big organization. And I worked for some amazing people and i there was a lot of things I really liked about the job. Other things that were hard for me, I think just as the kind of person I am, I was definitely like a cog in the wheel of the hub of the machine. I had very little say in in the overall kind of like outcomes of things. So that was something I like.
00:02:22
Speaker
clocked at that time that like ownership was something that was like really important to me. And i really wanted to feel like I was a part of something.
Solo Travels and Entrepreneurial Foundation
00:02:31
Speaker
and and then I traveled for a year by myself. I went all around Southeast Asia and got a really incredible sort of education just in having me Just like the ways of the world, trusting myself, having a lot of very interesting and incredible experiences, just meeting different types of people, traveling to different parts of the world, having to like solve a lot of problems and doing things on the fly. But I think the biggest thing was just learning to trust myself. And learning to be alone and what that meant to me at that age.
00:03:07
Speaker
From there, I actually moved to Paris. I was going to get my master's or I did get my master's, which was also incredible. It was so wonderful to spend 18 months in Europe and travel and meet a ton of people and all while getting my master's and figuring that out, taking out loans and just figuring out how to make it
Family Business and New York Move
00:03:27
Speaker
all work. And then and after I received my master's, I moved back to, or I moved to New York. It felt like the only place that was interesting to me at the time. Like I really, i loved London. I loved Paris too, but I liked kind of the feel of London and New York obviously has a similar feel.
00:03:44
Speaker
So once I moved to New York, I was doing some work for my family business, which my family business is a printing business. And I was writing all the copy and helping them redo their website. And in the process of writing all of this content and finding angles and telling stories on the website, I recognize that a lot of the equipment and printing that they were doing was something that was aligning with what was happening in New York at the time, which was this was like 2010, 2011.
00:04:11
Speaker
twenty ten twenty eleven And it was like the onslaught of direct to consumer businesses. So it was like Harry's was like the first one to say, we don't need to go through this middleman to create this razor. They bought a manufacturing plant in Germany and then they made the razors themselves and went straight to the consumer. There were so many companies doing it at the time.
Founding Chasing Paper - Innovation and Launch
00:04:32
Speaker
And it was really interesting because it was the beginning of Instagram, the beginning of social media, where you could speak directly to people and customers for like the first time ever.
00:04:42
Speaker
So I felt like there was a really interesting idea there. And I was doing some just like ad hoc work. And one of the things are one of the women that I met, she was the founder of Birchboxx. Katya and she, they were moving into new offices. And I thought, what if we could create something out of this peel and stick fabric that was being used at that time for like retail environments or like to wrap buses or doing different things like that. So the application wasn't necessarily like for wallpaper, but I was like, I think it could be. So we created this custom wall wraps is what we called them at the time. We wrapped their office on a month or on a Friday. And by Monday I had a couple of emails in my inbox from girls who worked at the company being like, I want this in my apartment. So it was just, it was so organic in terms of sort of founder stories and sort of, it there was just this, these little bits of validation, like moving along, which I hear from founders now. It's such a big part of those early days is having other people recognize it without you having to necessarily pitch it, if that makes sense.
00:05:49
Speaker
So I was off to the races. I, i Started very quickly after that. I built a web website. I did little photo shoots at my apartment in New York. And we launched about probably like eight months after that. And the crazy thing was, is that I was really just trying to use the resources I had at hand, which was no budget. I had absolutely zero marketing dollars, zero. I didn't have a publicist. It was just me And so I just did what I knew how to do, which was one, write. i wrote handwritten letters to any editor's name that I could find on the Internet.
00:06:22
Speaker
I wrote emails to every person in my circle who I knew from grad school, from undergrad, from just my time in New York. And I just asked for people's help to help get this company out into the world. And one of the women I went to graduate school with had forwarded it to Grace Bonney, who had a website called Design Sponge. It was like the biggest design website in like the twenty ten s And she wrote about it. And it was truly just like right time, right place. Her headline was something like, finally, there's cute removable wallpaper. And we were really off to the races. We had a lot of traffic to the site and had to learn very quickly, and which was great. We had actually like data to go off of. We had things to go off. at We had feedback. We had customers telling us what they liked and what they didn't like.
00:07:14
Speaker
So we moved really quickly and very nimbly in those first couple of years and we just celebrated 13 years in business, which is so wild. And it's really just continued that organic growth. We continue to listen to our customers and just build on the very simple ideas that design should be for everyone. And we sell removable wallpaper in panels. So you could just do a little, you know, like behind some, like a bookshelf or your refrigerator, if you're renting or just one little wall or doing an entire room in our traditional wallpaper and hopefully lots of every project in the middle.
Personal Growth from Travels
00:07:54
Speaker
But yeah, that's the origin story and how I came to where I am now. That's incredible. i was like taking notes as you went. There are so many things I wanted to touch on. I want to spend most of the time like that early launch time was really interesting to me.
00:08:07
Speaker
But you did say something I noted pre Paris, you were traveling. And you talked about how beneficial it was to have a lot of a alone time as like a younger person in your life.
00:08:18
Speaker
That resonates with me. Could you say more about that? Yeah, absolutely. i I'm one of four. i have an older sister and a little sister and a little brother. So I grew up in a very full house. Like I grew up in lots of chit chat and laughter and craziness and tears and all the rest of it. i'm Just growing up and having a childhood with lots of kids in the house, which I'm so grateful for. it They're my best friends and we're a super, super close family. But it did mean that I didn't have a ton of time by myself growing up. And even into college and a little bit after having roommates. And there wasn't just a lot of time just to discover like who I am and have some quiet in my brain, in my body. And traveling really provided that. And for anyone that's traveled alone, you know that there is some like uncomfortableness in that too There's a lot of time to think, a lot of time to overthink if you're not careful second guess yourself.
00:09:13
Speaker
But I think the alone time allowed space for me to be to creatively think to write to read to find out how i like to travel how what i like just following my own instincts more which i think is extremely foundational in entrepreneurship especially now with social media and all the rest of it there's so much noise at all times in life and It's important to know how to quiet things. And now I'm a mom of two young girls. So it's, I'm back to that where it's like the vibrations are high at all times. I have a team and finding a alone time is very few and far between, but it is something that I actively, and i carve out for myself because I just think it's a really part, a big part and a an important part of just human existence.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah. No, co-sign everything you said. 27, I think I walk at did El Camino de Santiago by myself, which is like a hiking path. and Yes. My dad really wants to do that. How long did you do it for? I didn't do the whole thing. I did the second half part of it.
00:10:23
Speaker
i got Two weeks vacation. I was like, I can do that. sures It was great. It was very fun. But yeah, it was all the things you mentioned. It was at times uncomfortable and at times very lonely and at times, but overall just a wildly necessary, like so little stretch. Yeah. And don't you think too, I think while I was traveling, it was like seeing things with your own eyes and accomplishing things with your own eyes. It's like, there is something that is so sad, like deeply satisfying, but not doing it for anybody else, but just doing it for yourself, especially something like you did, where there's this like,
00:11:01
Speaker
destination, right? Like you do it for yourself and it there's no one else there pushing you along, forcing you to finish. It's something that's really inside of yourself. There's no sort of better feeling to me than that. But I had never really thought about it as insofar as how it relates to like early entrepreneurship. But I think you're right. And there are so many parallels there.
00:11:21
Speaker
in that first year when you had zero marketing dollars, first of all, I love the handwritten letters and I love all the emails. You got to do it. What was that like the first year to how to, I guess what I'm asking specifically is I'm wondering about how you added to the team in those first couple of years.
Business Strategy: Lean Team Approach
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, it was very slow. And we still actually now 13 years later have some of the same principles that we founded on too, which is that we have always kept like a pretty lean team. We're just a team of six currently, but we have a lot of agencies. And I actually was just listening to another podcast. Do you know Hulkenbags?
00:12:00
Speaker
No, they're like these bags that are like on wheels and like everyone in New York has them. It's like how you get your groceries home from the grocery store instead of having to lug everything. It's like they're really cute, like makeup artists and hair. Like they're big in like certain industries, too, where you have to lug a lot of stuff. And this makes it so much easier. And they're like really cute. They started a podcast where they basically are just like talking about what what it's like building a brand. And I was listening to an episode the other day and they were just talking about how they've reached like $50 million dollars in revenue and they only have a seven person team. And the founder was just saying, she's, I think something that has been magical is that if like for us to like our marketing agency, our PR agency, our dev agency, you have to, they have to be operating at like the best in class because they're an agency. And so it's people move through agencies quickly if they they aren't
00:12:53
Speaker
performing at this like really top tier. This has never been like a formal strategy that I've done, but it's just been how I've felt comfortable scaling and growing a business.
00:13:05
Speaker
And that's pretty much how we've always done it. I've had a really small team that's like the internal chasing paper team, but then used agencies that come to me that our friends have used them or by referral that I know really understand what we're trying to do. And then from different parts of our journey, we've moved on from certain agencies to another one, whether it's just we needed a bigger reach, more people, different skill sets, different things. But it's been just an interesting way to grow because I think it allows for us to have really high expectations on certain segments of the business and then just find the right people and the right fit and not feeling like i have to hire so quickly and then take on the overhead of what it means to hire a full-time person.
00:13:52
Speaker
And it's also allowed us to be really nimble, which I think especially in e-commerce, especially just even in the last five years, and what was working even a year ago, even six months ago, doesn't work today. Things are moving and changing so quickly. You've got to be able to adapt. And i think agencies to allow you to have a larger team without having all of the overhead of a larger team. Like for our marketing agency, we have a copywriter, a designer, a strategist, an email person. paid and it's just for one retainer a month versus if I had to hire six people to do that, obviously would be much more expensive. And then it would be on me to be managing all of those people and schedules and all of that. That's something that we did in the early days that has continued to today.
00:14:39
Speaker
Oh yeah. No, 100%. As an agency owner, you're speaking my language. yeah Yes. Yes. And I think too, I remember thinking about this way back when I was, because before Medbury, I was a chief product officer and then a COO at a big content marketing agency.
00:14:54
Speaker
And obviously when you're running an agency scale, has its challenges. If you've got like 100 copywriters, like every day somebody is doing something amazing and someone's doing something kind of crazy. you i gotta your But I do think that I don't see people talk a lot about the fact that if you are working with a big agency and they're doing like even a sufficient job of internally communicating their learnings.
00:15:18
Speaker
and then you know like infusing the work they're doing across the board for clients with what they learned over the last quarter. and some There's so much insight that can then be like very quickly actioned out. So it's not just like you have to learn for your brand all these little things. It's okay, this agency also works with 80 other clients. They learned 10 million things last month and they're being applied to my work and now It just increases the quality and the efficacy of the work if the agency is doing a good job with communication. I could not agree more. And I think also to most of the people who are on any of our teams, PR, marketing, dev, they're also working across so many different categories and verticals. And I think to...
00:16:00
Speaker
It's so hard to some, I have a lot of people who are in my industry, so I know what's going on, but what's going on like in in an adjacent category and what could the learnings there be? And I think also having, you know, even after Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like our marketing firm comes out with all of this stuff and I have all of this access to all of these analytics and benchmarks and different things that like one as a smaller business, one, I would never pay if you could pay for all of that stuff, of course, but I'm getting it as part of being signed up with this agency. And then it is great to be able to say, okay, this is how how our category was doing, but here's how other categories we're doing. And what can we learn? And what can we glean? And what can we
Philosophy on Profitable Business
00:16:42
Speaker
do better next time? Or what really like crushed? And can we try to repeat? And yeah, it's been the way that we have felt comfortable learning. And I also think it's helped us weather a lot of storms. A lot of the companies that I came up with
00:16:55
Speaker
who were in my kind of starting class in New York in 2013, 2014. Most of them, I would say, are not around anymore. They've been sold or they went out of business or they had to pivot into something unrecognizable. And I think something in the secret sauce was one, I was never on a trajectory where I was like, I want to be this like overnight success. I want to do a hundred million dollars. That was never my goal. My goal was to really run profitable company, which for many years in New York was like the unsexiest, uncoolest conversation ending way to grow a business. And I mean that very seriously. Like as soon as I would say that like we weren't just trying to scale at any cost, people's eyes would like glaze over and they would find a reason to leave the
00:17:39
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Just because that was the time. Money was like free. Everyone was getting these crazy valuations. Everyone was taking money. and it just never felt like the course that I wanted to take. i always just felt, maybe it's the Midwesterner in me, that running a profitable company was just like the way that I felt comfortable. It was the way I could sleep at night. And now it's funny because the tables have completely turned. Anyone that wants to give anyone money, the only thing that they're looking for is like, their EBITDA numbers. It's like huh no one is even, no one cares about top line growth anymore or what you can project or what you can predict.
00:18:15
Speaker
Everyone cares about bottom line. I think in that way it's come full circle and it took a long time to get there, but I'm glad that i stuck to my instincts there because again, I'm just a more conservative person by nature in terms of the amount of risk I'm willing to take with my business. And I'm glad I didn't push it just to like fit into the the trend of what everyone else was doing. And here we are 13 years later. Congratulations on 13 years. That's why that's wonderful. Yes, it's bananas. I think we're talking about following your intuition on that too. Because i think when you're first starting out, things, it can be, i don't know if you felt this way, but even things that I felt strong convictions about, like I was vulnerable a little and I was like a little more malleable than usual. And yeah having a bunch of people tell you,
00:19:01
Speaker
not how I do it. It's not nothing. So i I so admire how you stuck to it. Yeah. And I certainly didn't stick to everything. That's the other side of that coin, right? When someone would be like, oh, you know who you should what you should do or you know what you should try. wasn't like I was completely not vulnerable to any of those things because if we tried a lot and failed. then we But I think the good news was is that even in the trial and error and the failure, it was – things were still moving in like the right direction. And so I had enough data to know and to, and also to be small. I think we, people, I think ah measure success and like how big your team is and how big your offices are. And especially growing up at that time in New York, it was like all the offices had free, free food and so just all of this stuff that they could offer people. And i obviously we were, it was me for many years and then it was me and my brother. And then it was like me and two other people. it was, It's always been pretty small, but I think the best thing that we can offer is just this ability to continue to be nimble. And we're not ever so oversaturated that we don't feel if we see a really great opportunity, we can't go after it. It's just basically, I talk with my brother. If we say yes, we go after it. And there isn't a lot of like bureaucracy built into the company because we're small and lean.
00:20:19
Speaker
know what is What's a day in your life like? I know average days are hard to approximate, but what are the things you're generally working on? Yeah. Since having kids and becoming a mom, my days are a little bit more routine, I guess.
Balancing Work and Family
00:20:32
Speaker
But wake up with my girls, get them off to school. we come into the office. My team comes in two days a week. I'm usually here three or four days just because it's quiet and pretty. Come to the office and really the ah my day is spent Half in just like meetings, I manage most of our team. The marketing team rolls into me. The PR team rolls into me.
00:20:53
Speaker
Dev runs, goes between me and my brother. I'm doing more of the creative stuff for Dev. He's doing more of like the operations and just like tactical IT side. Lots of internal meetings too, just on creative direction for collections we're working on, new product development. But it's a super collaborative, creative job. It's been really fun and growing the team. We've grown, we added three new people this past year, which has been so much fun and are just like since the start of the year, I guess I should say. it's been so fun to have more people and more ideas and more people weigh in and help us with processes and fresh eyes on things that we've been doing for a while has been really fantastic. And then I pick my girls up every day at 3.30. That was also a really important thing for me since they started school. They go literally two blocks from my office to school.
00:21:44
Speaker
And most days I just pick them up and drop them off at whatever activity they have their day at after school. And so I can wrap up my day or i take them home and get them a snack and finish my day there. But I'm so grateful for the many crazy 80 hour weeks I spent early in my career to build an ecosystem where I have a lot of flexibility in that now. Just being able to, yeah, be there at pickup and they still run to me. They're still little enough where they're like interested in having me pick them up. So for as long as I can do that, I want to. And we're definitely like a family first company overall. And we know that people's real lives are the most important things, people's families and family and friends and
00:22:27
Speaker
interests and we really try to provide that flexibility for our whole team. Sounds incredible. There are a couple different directions I want to go in. One thing I just want to say is I've been thinking a lot about work backgrounds because for some of our clients, we're generally doing about leadership strategy, mostly lots of things on LinkedIn for them, but sometimes it's a slightly broader consultancy. And I've been thinking about how how your background really matters. I agree. And it's like the it's um you're inviting people into your space. You're
00:22:59
Speaker
Whatever you put there, even if you ignore it, you're saying you're telegraphing something about yourself. And I have to say, I've been down a ive been down rabbit holes of wallpaper and I spent some on your site and I thought there's so many beautiful options. Thank you.
00:23:12
Speaker
Do you feel – know you were like writing. and journalism. And now you've gone into something so visual. Obviously, as we're talking, there's so much still creative and analytical things happening throughout your day, it
Creative Evolution and Storytelling
00:23:25
Speaker
seems. But when were there when you were younger, did you also feel like you had a strong aesthetic sense or did you think of yourself as a words person? And how what has the movement been like to go into something way more visual as opposed to words? Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a really great question. I feel like when I'm interviewed for a lot of it, I answer like the same seven questions and I've never been asked that question. So I feel like it's a really good one. It's funny, since I was very little, i loved having my room be set up in a certain way. And I've always been a person like I need to like, when I was working out of my new apartment in New York, it was like, I would have to like have
00:23:59
Speaker
things tidy and clean in order to like start work. So I think that there's always been this ah aspect of that has allowed me to, and just putting things together, like whether it's an outfit or a like a space or my girls' nurseries, I loved designing my girls' nurseries because it was just so imaginative and fun. And I feel like I do have instincts and ideas. I'm 41 years old. It's like, I know what I like. And I've spent a lot of time trying and failing at different things. But I think visually,
00:24:34
Speaker
Chasing paper, obviously, ah that's all what it is. It's like we have to hook someone in two seconds with an image. Or i think what I've come to learn over the years is just to, one, i know what I like, but I also like to really leave room for other things and other people. And that's why getting to work on collections has been such a important part of my work is that, and it is going back to that foundational sort of storytelling is it's like, how, what is the story of this person? What are the story of these patterns? What are the story of these prints? Because we want you to come to chasing paper and we hope that there's something for everyone. We really try to find
00:25:15
Speaker
whether it's an artist, a designer, a fine artist, a surface designer. There's so many different ways that people can, our collections can come together from various backgrounds. But the biggest thing or the most important thing to us is that point of view and the story behind it.
00:25:33
Speaker
And then it's how we communicate that. It's both visual and having that sort of story aspect of it. Obviously, you know this from your world, from like a content perspective is like, how are we weaving this story throughout? And obviously we try to have everything have like a similar look and feel on the site, but that's just more in terms of like creative direction of like how we shoot things and we want things to be like bright and crisp and aspirational. And so we try to think of all of our visual identity stuff with that lens. like And wallpaper too, it's like, it has to be timeless. It has to be something that you're going to want to live with. It's an investment. And we want people to be able to have fun with it, but also feel confident about their decisions. So I think that there's a lot of different sort of avenues of it, but even just trusting my
00:26:21
Speaker
creative and vision of things has taken a lot of time. I felt very, I used to just tell people like, oh, I'm but i'm not a designer. i'm not an I'm not an artist. I would really shy away you from that. And while I still wouldn't call myself a designer or an artist, because I'm certainly neither of those things, I am a creative director and I have a really good idea of like How do we create collections and visual identities that one are exciting two that people maybe necessarily haven't seen before? And three, that we're telling a new story. And i think when you look at everything through the lens of that, I've learned to trust myself a lot more. And yeah, I think it's been definitely a bit process. for sure. And one that I've still not mastered. I'm not like, I'm at the end of the road. I've arrived. It's like, we're, so I'm still very much learning day to day, week to week without question.
00:27:12
Speaker
That's so interesting. Okay. I want to double click on the idea of being consistent. Maybe this isn't exactly what you're saying, but also just being consistently in a process of trusting yourself more and more.
00:27:25
Speaker
And I would say like for myself, maybe 75% of the time, I think I'm really good at it. And then another percentage, something happens to me and I – don't and I like what you were saying was resonating with me of being like I'm not an artist I'm not a designer like sometimes I'll get off a call and I'll be like why the hell did I just denigrate myself so much like why can't these sometimes it's like I every now and then this old reflex pops up to just like undercut my experience and authority or something and I'm working on it but how what has that process of and embodying your own authority over time looked and felt like for you
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, I have a really good recent example of this.
Publishing 'Wallflowers' and Personal Growth
00:28:06
Speaker
i i wrote a book. it came out in March. And it was the most vulnerable i have felt in a really long time putting that book into the world because...
00:28:17
Speaker
i'm Am I an author? am i that Then you're seeing all the other books that are going out into the world. And oh my God, this one is by this big publisher and had this big budget and it looks like a million bucks. And you're comparing and contrasting. and then also too, I mean, it was it's 10 years of my work, but it was like two years of like writing and editing. And it's it's this huge project.
00:28:39
Speaker
And then it's just like out into the world and you have no real... like ability to give people the backstory of the story or of the book. Like, I know that if I speak to someone about it, they'll be like, oh my gosh, that's great or whatever. But you send this thing, this very vulnerable thing out into the world. And it was,
00:28:57
Speaker
I mean, I felt like I took 10 steps back in terms of like my confidence and authority because it was something so new. And I have never done this before. And it was like an eye opener for me. i My anxiety was so high about it. i And even just having to market it and talk about it and promote myself felt so foreign because for the last 13 years,
00:29:20
Speaker
Sure, I'm the founder of the business, but the business is itself it's its own thing. And I'm just like behind the scenes making the things happen. So if a collection doesn't resonate in the way that I think it will, I have a little bit of a something to hide behind.
00:29:34
Speaker
And a book was the opposite. It was like, it felt like being like naked in front of a crowd. But I'm so glad I did it because it's like, you have to be reminded of like how that feels in order to push through it and to now say,
00:29:48
Speaker
No, like this book is great. And it's representative of all of this work. And and it's in the world now. And I'm proud of it. And my daughters get to see it and all of these things. But it was a real it was a real confidence like.
00:30:05
Speaker
exercise, I guess I would say for myself, which and I had not anticipated that in the writing of the book, I was just like excited. i was happy. But when it got time, like when I was like holding it in my hands, I realized that it was like being shipped to all these people who had bought it.
00:30:19
Speaker
Man, was it? Yeah, it was crazy. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I do think there is something to, I think there's this idea that one keeps achieving things and like each time you take a new step up, it feels natural, but I think there's like extreme regression and then growth and it's so painful, but can you,
00:30:41
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about your book and we're going to put the link in the show notes because I'm glad you brought into the world. Yes. It's called wall Wallflowers, A Love Letter to Wallpaper. and it really, part one, just talks about the history of wallpaper, very short, brief, little history, just to give some context for people who are interested. And then it talks a little bit about my journey and my history. Maybe the most special section of the book is I shot my grandmother's home. Who's still alive and 95 years old. And she lives just...
00:31:10
Speaker
an hour away in Illinois and getting to, because really at the heart of wallpaper and at the heart of Chasing Paper, it's a lot about nostalgia. People have like really intimate feelings around wallpaper. It's in the home that they grew up. It was in their grandmother's home. It's something that they dreamed about putting in their babies. There's just a lot of feelings around it. And we take those feelings really seriously. A lot of times people want to talk about my business. They'll be like, oh, you own a wallpaper business? It's like very flip. Oh, that's cute. Oh, that's whatever.
00:31:40
Speaker
We don't feel that way. We feel actually like wallpaper is like... inherently so transformational. And it's something that is like in the backdrop of all of your memories. Like it is truly something. And I've had, I know this to my core because I have been at cocktail parties for the last 15 years where people like will confide in me once they know I have a wallpaper company about something that's so deeply personal or so special. And so we really take what we do very seriously. If you're welcoming chasing paper into your home and you're using it as this starting point for a room or a jumping off point or creating your
00:32:17
Speaker
but I'm very aware that one day I'll be a grandmother, God willing, and that like my grandkids or that my daughters will one day be on like a date and be talking about the house that they grew up in. And I hope that they say it was like so colorful and warm and inviting and all the things. This is a very roundabout. I love it. To talk about the book, but the book is really about that. And then in the second part of the book, I interview friends and designers and collaborators. And we just talk about what pattern means to them and how they incorporate wallpaper into their projects. and how they talk about it to their clients and what it means to them. And so it's just a real love letter to wallpaper. And it's just been such a delight and a joy to really go through this process, even the ups and the downs, even the
00:33:02
Speaker
feelings of vulnerability and comparison and all of the things that like sometimes I feel like in my 40s I'm like over in a lot of ways or things that I really struggled with in my 20s and 30s is like looking what everyone else did. I got married much later. I had kids much later and I watched for so many years like my friends getting these things and for a lot of years I was like maybe I won't have that or I was just constantly comparing and I think the beauty of being in your forty s is I've let so much of that go. So that's why when this kind of stuff came up with the book, I was unprepared. I thought that I like wasn't really in that place in my life anymore. But moving through it, I think, allowed me to appreciate just the process of the book writing and that that journey in a different way. And being on the other side of it now, just I feel very grateful for the opportunity.
00:33:52
Speaker
Oh, well, I'm going to be ordering that as soon as we go. So nice. Thank you. It's funny what you say about wallpaper. I never really thought about it before. this is related. There was like a fabric and a wallpaper, like a matching thing that I had when I was in, when i was like 18. i'm like 39 now. And last year i had a weird dream about a box with that pattern. And I woke up and I was like, what was that? What was that? And I was like, oh my God. That was a pattern from 20 years ago that I looked at every day. these They do stay with us. And that's so interesting that people like confide in you around like personal moments around wallpaper. But I get it. i totally It makes sense. And I think it's why certain patterns and things speak to you, even subconsciously. Sometimes even when I was writing the book, I had all of our designers send pictures from when they were kids, send me pictures from growing up.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I'm not kidding. You could line those pictures up with the designs that they are doing now. And it it was like one to one. I mean, it was. And I think for them to even see it laid out like that, it was like this has been in you from like day one. it's It is even if you go out and you do something totally different for a while, how it comes back around is truly like crazy.
Nostalgia and Wallpaper Connections
00:35:13
Speaker
And it's also incredible. And even if the aesthetic is different, like we had one of the designers, she was like, I grew up in this house that was like, everything was like this look. And it's not the look of her design now, but the cohesiveness of the house that she grew up in to the cohesiveness of the design that she does now, it's one-to-one. And some of them were just like one-to-one anyway, like the floral prints and the whatever was exactly what the kind of patterns and prints that they're using in the design now. But it was like,
00:35:40
Speaker
It was, again, something that I had always felt and I had heard from my customers. It was like more anecdotal. But this was really like it was so cool. And that was like one of the most beautiful parts of the book is like getting to those final stages where you're actually like laying it out and you're figuring out like what image will go where and pairing all the text with things because it was like so easy because it was just like, oh, obviously this goes here ah because it was just like so organic, which was just a surprising part of the book. I figured that would probably be like the most labor intensive part, but that was actually the part that really came together the most naturally. Just, and I, again, I think it's because of the inherent nature and nostalgic just through lines that happened and not just with wallpaper, it's with design, I think in general, but it was really cool to see. That's fascinating.
00:36:32
Speaker
Isn't it? that Oh my gosh, Elizabeth, you're such a fascinating interview. I like I could talk to you for three hours. don't know if you're praying, but I know we don't have a ton of
Expansion with New Fabric Line
00:36:44
Speaker
time left. For folks who are interested, we will definitely, where should we send them? Is there anywhere in particular where you're like, get on this newsletter? We'll definitely put the link to the book and we'll put the link to your website in the show notes. Anything else that you'd want? to yeah We love an Instagram follow. I'm a millennial. So that is like our social media. We are actually just like launching a sub stack, which we're working on right now, which I think is going to be fun just for some longer form, being able to go into things a little bit more in depth. But yeah, we also do, ah i think a really great job of like our newsletter. If you sign up on our, through our website, which is just chasing paper.com. There's just like a lot of like inspirational, aspirational content that we send through our newsletter.
00:37:21
Speaker
And we have a lot of really exciting things happening like the rest of this year. We're launching fabric in June, which is like something I've been working on for a year and it's going to be so good. And we're so excited to be adding again, this like next layer into for 13 years, I've been like, I own a wall coverings company. And now I'm going to be able like, I own a textile company. And it again, feels extremely organic.
00:37:45
Speaker
Feels like we're ready to do it. It's the right time. We've got the right team in place and we're so excited for what that can mean for our business. Wow. Congratulations. I'm gonna be following along very closely. Oh, it's so nice. Thank you so much.
00:38:00
Speaker
And thank you so much for taking this time. i really admire what you're doing and appreciate it. Back at you. No, same. I think like the, once I, once you reached out and just listening to the podcast and I like, I'm such a podcast person. It's just, it's refreshing the way you frame questions too. I think i it's,
00:38:18
Speaker
hard to not get into just that. Every one of your interviews sounds different and is different. And I think when you're asking people questions, probably over and over, you find a way to make it really fresh. So congratulations on the success with the podcast. And i can't wait to continue to listen.
00:38:32
Speaker
Oh, that's really nice of you. Thank you. Yes.