Saturday, March 17, 2012

Hello, Goodbye! Come say hi!

It's been just shy of a year since I publicly bid adieu to Hello Bella on this blog, and at the very end of that blog post, I said " I hope to finally enrol myself in a graphic design course, and continue to hone my skills to create pretty printable materials. It won't be anytime soon, but keep an eye out for Hello Bella invitations, printable parties, labels and much more." 






Well, here I am announcing I have finally found an outlet for my creative energy, and would love for you to join me on the ride! I took a slightly different path than I thought; I have focused more on organizational and household labels than event graphics, however there will still be the odd thing here and there for weddings and events.




I really struggled with my branding this time. I feel like I moved a bit too quick with Hello Bella, and although I loved my cute little moniker at first, it grew old really fast. I also felt that unless you added the wordy "Weddings and Events" to the end, that it really wasn't descriptive in any way, which wasn't doing me any favours.


I have, ummm, about 2000 Hello Bella business cards and about 500 promotional postcards sitting in a box in my office. I was extremely tempted to stick with Hello Bella for my little graphics business so that I could recycle all of my printed materials, but in the end I just couldn't. First and foremost, this is a completely different baby than Hello Bella was, and I wanted that to be clear. And second, I made a lot of mistakes when starting out and branding HB, that I just needed a clean and fresh slate.




So The Paper Society was born! To be completely honest, it happened much quicker than I was planning because of a feature about my labels on the popular blog iHeart Organizing. I wasn't going to roll out my etsy shop until I had a good inventory of ready made label templates, professional photography, and solid branding (and a mini business plan of course!), but when the feature opportunity came up, I knew I had to be ready. Fortunately I've had the name settled on a for a few months and haven't tired of it yet. I feel like it's solid, it evokes a certain kind of lifestyle, and is fairly descriptive without having to force the words "labels" or "graphics" into it. The logo, on the other hand, is not officially locked in and was something I had to whip up to pull the etsy shop together in time. I'm liking it for now, but open to it evolving over time.






There is a point to this lenghty, boring post, I promise! This is likely the last time I will ever post on this blog, and there are still 50 or so of you subscribed to it. I'm not even here to shamelessly plug my etsy shop or my facebook page, but actually wanted to invite you over to my personal blog The Social Home. I PROMISE the posts won't be wordy like this one! I'm mainly chronicling my adventures in diy decorating our home as well as the odd label design (and freebie). I spend a lot of my free time doing household projects, and a lot of them are share-worthy, so perhaps you will find something useful over there! 


That is all for now! If you stop by my blog, please say hi! I'm really looking forward to this next chapter! 


All the best! xox J