Heartell turns ten this week (August 14, 2014 is the day I filed my paperwork to form an LLC in New York State). Since most businesses have closed by this point in their history, this is a monumental milestone that I do not take for granted; my team and I have been thinking about it and celebrating it all year.

Putting all of the learning and experiences of a decade’s work into one post has proven a daunting task. I decided that instead of trying to distill what might be useful to our diverse community of shop owners, printmaking enthusiasts and card writers (and hoarders) into a digestible block of text, I would share a practice my team and I have adopted for making sense of our experience and planning for the future.

At our biannual retreats, we set aside time to look back at our achievements and disappointments, to look inward to see what we can learn from them and make sure our actions are aligned with our values, and look forward in order to create a vision for the future that we can work towards.

I hope this will be at least entertaining for you to read, and possibly even inspire you to look at your own work, whatever that might be, through this helpful trifold lens.

Looking Backward: 10 Things We Don’t Do Anymore

1. Taking all our packages to the post office, piled on a red four-wheel dolly, uphill on foot
2. Printing all our cards on the tabletop Pilot press
3. Mixing all our ink by hand
4. Carving every single block for every single color by hand (now we use a digitally printed plate for the second and third colors)
5. Entering all our sales data, SKU by SKU, order by order, by hand into Google sheets (it is killing me all over again just to write this down)
6. Having two Shopify stores (and creating every product listing in duplicate)
7. Having two wholesale email service providers (ESP’s in the lingo) and an entirely separate ESP for our retail community and doing all our email marketing in triplicate (yes, we really did this, for years)
8. Scoring paper one card at a time on the press (the secret is out, we stopped out of necessity and when we realized no one cared, we just never went back to it)
9. Using the wrong formulation of ink (rubber-based, so that it took foooooreeeeevvvvveeeerr to dry, and sometimes never really did)
10. Doing everything all by myself
    
    

Looking Inward (at our Values): 10 Things We Still Do That We’ve Always Done

1. Print all of our paper products on 100% recycled paper
2. Hand feed each card into the press, once for each color (so up to three times per card)
3. Hand carve at least one block for each letterpress card
4. Include a handwritten note with every order
5. Hand fold and package every card (though some of our customers now forgo plastic sleeves, hurray!)
6. Create original artwork for each design (no licensed or stock imagery or text)
7. Check each card for quality by hand (this practice is the source of our ever-popular seconds packs)
8. Take all our own product photography for cards (though we’ve had excellent professional help with photos of our towels and art prints, and Athena has recently taken over taking photos of cards which I used to do exclusively)
9. Carefully track every point of contact with our retailers and treasure our relationships with every single one
10. Connect in person with customers at retail markets (we had a couple of years in there when we didn’t because of things like newborns and pandemics but our team is a regular presence again at markets in Indiana)
    
    

Looking Inward (at our Learning): 10 things we’ve learned to do over the last decade

1. Delegate almost everything to people who are better at those things than I am (my work these days is mostly about designing new products, creating some content for marketing and planning and overseeing new projects)
2. Hold weekly meetings and biannual retreats for our multi-location team to stay connected and maintain momentum (thank you Aunt Dawn for what has maybe turned out to be the best piece of business advice I’ve ever received)
3. Use project management software to track projects and communicate (Airtable is where everything important in our business now lives)
4. Record Standard Operating Procedures for all the work we do that repeats
5. Budget a year in advance, one quarter at a time (our bookkeeper and CFO taught us this, thank you Ben of Pinto Financial)
6. Track our inventory effectively across multiple sales channels (we now use Finale for this, see earlier note about soul-crushing data entry in G-sheets, thank you Kristin for spending three years of your life figuring this out)
7. Create quarterly marketing roadmaps and a weekly editorial calendar to connect with our community in an authentic way on a consistent basis (thank you Ellen Grace Marketing for teaching us how and thank you Athena Harden for helping me keep it going without losing my mind)
8. Design and manufacture sustainable non-card products including bookmarks, risograph art prints and postcards, kitchen towels and sponge cloths and (new this year!) eco-friendly stickers
9. Use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create both vector- and raster-based seamlessly repeating patterns (thank you Bonnie Christine and Sarah Watts)
10. Take time off (aside from my two maternity leaves, which were not relaxing, this summer is the first time I’ve taken an extended leave from daily operations which has been deeply restorative and it is because of the hard work and dedication of our whole team that this has been possible)
    
    

Looking Forward: 10 things we aspire to do in the next 10 years

1. Release our first collection of twelve month calendars
2. License repeating patterns as surface designs for gift wrap and gift bags, wallpaper and fabric
3. Release our first collection of photo card designs with our licensing partner Postable
4. Add a Heidelberg press to our studio to streamline and increase our letterpress production 
5. Continue to push our business in the direction of sustainability and a circular economy with reusable packaging and zero-waste designs
6. Announce a reimagined iteration of our Art for Change project with more focus and a bigger impact 
7. Collaborate with writers and poets and possibly even other visual artists on future card collections
8. Exhibit at a trade show (we did the National Stationery Show in 2016 and 2017 but haven’t been to an in-person show since then)
9. Continue to publish illustrated essays and recipes on It Can Stay a Question on Substack
10. Write, illustrate and publish a book about how cooking and creating can help with navigating grief (I illustrated my first cookbook in 2023 and loved it so much I started working on an idea of my own)

Thanks for reading friends, and for all your support over these last ten years! I'm so grateful and I can't wait to see what happens next.