I landed my first job out of college through LA connections with Brillstein Grey Entertainment, an entertainment management company that also does production. I was the second assistant to Brad Grey, who now runs Paramount. At the time, Brillstein Grey was producing some great HBO shows, including The Sopranos.

No. I was majoring in women's studies so that I could pursue public speaking to young girls struggling with body image and self-esteem issues. I knew that career wasn't going to be a slam-dunk right after college, which is why I pursued the job at Brillstein Grey. I was speaking at elementary and junior high schools on the side, but about six months into that I realized that I didn't actually enjoy it. I had anxiety about speaking and I didn't want to make a career out of it, on top of which I realized I hated my job as a second assistant. 

When I left my second assistant job my boss was gracious and he offered me a job at a start-up company that he was launching. Someone had told me once, if you look up and you don't want anyone's job above you, you're in the wrong place, and in that company the only person's job that appealed to me was the art director's job. Her name is Ophelia Chong and she taught me the Adobe series: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. I really wanted to go into letterpress printing and my parting gift from her was a letterpress tool, one that we still use today—a book of over one thousand fonts, plus a disc.

I didn’t have office hours with Ophelia so I worked with her in the morning and then the rest of my time was spent on side projects. There's something really interesting about stationery that seems counterintuitive: stationery is viral. When you do a hundred wedding invitations for somebody that go to a hundred houses, people take notice of the product. From there, I started generating business on the side and it eventually became my income.

Snow & Graham is one of the original companies that started using letterpress and made it very popular 10 or 15 years ago. I had a Snow & Graham card and my business partner, Jamie, and I would run our fingers over it and say, “How are they doing this?” I did a Google search for letterpress and found a tabletop, which is considered a hobby letterpress, for sale.

Nobody taught me, I taught myself. I did it all wrong and we used way too much ink. I look back on those first jobs and notice how sloppy the ink is in places, but I just kept at it. I eventually moved to a big letterpress machine that I shared with a designer friend. I would sell letterpress during the day and print at night.

We priced it all wrong, even after we started the store. That was something that Jamie and I really learned the hard way. When we opened the store we were selling custom-made letterpress cards for $2 a card. So for 50 pieces of stationery we were charging $100, plus a $25 set up fee. We weren't even breaking even on that product.

It took us a really long time to correct the cost because, at the time, Jamie and I were working at the store, designing everything and printing everything. We had enough money to pay all the bills, but we weren't paying ourselves, and it took us a really long time to sit down and actually create a spreadsheet that captured the costs. When people ask why it's so expensive, there's not an apologetic bone in my body because now I just know how much it costs to make these things.

Find your own look. What I see too often in this industry is people borrowing a lot of different looks from a lot of different companies, and then their company is just a smattering of everybody else's work. I think the companies that are successful are the ones with a strong identity.

Making products by hand and in our headquarters is important to us and has a lot to do with control. We get really frustrated when we have to send out for something because we can't control the quality and the timing. By making all of the products ourselves, we control our press schedule and the quality. We love it but it makes things more labor-intensive. We do old-school manufacturing.

I don't find it challenging to keep up with our high-end reputation only because our company culture is rooted in that. Everybody who works here was taught that from the moment they started.

Jamie and I are inspired a lot by one another. We like a lot of the same things and that’s why the Sugar Paper aesthetic is so clear. When we're completely dry, we go to Anthropologie. It's such a funny thing, but we'll wander through there because it is such a flea market experience. You're not getting one angle; you're seeing a lot of different colors, a lot of different patterns. Pinterest and Kate Spade are also big inspirations for us. I feel like you have to know what your thing is and be really confident in that. 

We expand our team when we have to. It's really when we absolutely physically cannot do it with the team that we have. We prefer to train somebody because we taught ourselves and we have our own style of printing. If somebody comes from letterpress they actually can't print the way we print because they're coming to the table with their own method. We're big fans of starting from scratch with our pressmen. Our designers have been with us for a long time and our hiring process has a lot to do with someone's attitude. We have about 12 full-time and 10 part-time employees.

If a client has a specific deadline, it could take 3 weeks, like when we partnered with Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle website. From the time we sit down and brainstorm the design, plate the job, get it on the press schedule, have it printed and packaged, the shortest cycle is 2 to 3 weeks. When we do all of our development for our launch every year at the stationery show in May, we start in January. It takes a really long time and we schedule it on the calendar based on seasons.

When we opened the store we only purchased products from other designers. We didn't have any of our own products. We did custom orders ourselves and we also sold custom through other companies, but we couldn't find specific products that our customers wanted. We were so embarrassed that we always had to say no, so we started making our own designs.

One of the main differences for us is that private designers design and then they take their designs to market. We get to design and then put them in our retail stores and see if they work. I think it's a pretty interesting thing because something that we all love might bomb with the retail consumer. We make what we know people want to buy and I'm totally comfortable with that. We don't put out anything that we don't like, but some of our ideas that we thought were going to be big sellers just don’t move.

My answer when we started versus my answer now is totally different. Now, I'm never the first person here. One of the biggest luxuries about owning my own business is that I am not racing to work to get to a desk at a certain time. I'm here usually around ten, sit down, check my email, check my voicemail, etc. Jamie and I share an office so we sit and talk for a lot of the morning, whether it is a response to an email or something about one of our kids. It's social and business. Every Monday we have a staff meeting where we base the conversation around the staff agendas, not ours. Depending on what happens at the meeting or something that Jamie and I need to address, we execute on lists. We have lists all over the place. I handle public relations, social media, web and human resources, so I interface with the staff a lot more. Jamie handles finance, accounting and human resources from a policy standpoint. We co-design everything, so a lot of our day also is spent art directing.

That it's not easy. It's really demanding. The myth is that I get to make my own schedule, but that's not true at all. It owns me.

It's such a silly thing but when we opened the store not only did we have no money, but we painted the walls, bought the product, installed the point of sale, designed everything, printed everything, handled customer support—everything. Every year we close our Century City store for one week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I remember locking the door on the 24^th of December and standing and looking at the store and just bawling. I felt like so many people told me that I couldn't do it, and I was drowning in it at that point, but I felt that moment of, “Ha! I can do this.” That was my moment. I had a coach tell me that the best feeling is exhaustion after victory and I do feel like some of the best moments are at midnight on December 20^th when my whole team is here laughing, drinking wine and tying bows. 

We're really digging deep into expanding our product line. We celebrated ten years of business in August and that was a big moment for us.

The future of our company is being businesspeople: streamlining expenses and processes, and making sure that if we're going to spend a lot of energy doing something, it's really worth it. I think that has a lot to do with being a parent. I used to be here from 9 o’clock in the morning until 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night. I don't have the luxury of doing that anymore. When we're here, it has to be worth it.