One of the places right at the top of our list of destinations to visit when we make it to the west coast is Urbanic Paper Boutique, a truly inspired shop dedicated to all things pretty and all things paper, a store we’re honored to call a Smock retailer. Before opening Urbanic, owner Audrey Woollen worked in the fashion industry for many years. She fell in love with the evolution of style and the dynamic nature of the fashion world and that, combined with her lifelong love for paper, led to the opening of Urbanic. She began designing stationery and invitations for friends and eventually was inspired to create a boutique in her neighborhood stocked with a carefully considered array of the best in hard-to-find paper goods. Audrey shares, “I wanted to fill a niche for style-minded brides who wanted something completely original. I discovered so many great lines (like Smock) that filled this niche perfectly and was bursting with excitement to share these finds with Los Angeles.”
Today, Urbanic is a boutique recognized nation-wide for carrying an incredible variety of paper and letterpress goods geared toward fashionable people looking for something a bit special and a touch unusual. When choosing products and planning events for the store, Audrey is inspired by design of all kinds – architecture, furniture, fashion, graphic and interior design. For her, filling the shop with beautiful things is a true joy. Items are hand-picked with a keen attention to detail, keeping the store well-edited and cohesive so it’s inviting as soon as you walk in the door. When asked about what she loves most about her job, Audrey shares, “I enjoy coming into work because our existence is based around all the good things in life! Weddings, babies, birthdays, gift giving, thoughtfulness…there is a constant flow of creativity around here. Whether we are making paper vines for an event, building a paper pom pom window install, helping customers coordinate their wedding stationery, or doing an over the top gift-wrapping job, there is always something amazing being produced!”
Being such a trendsetter herself, we had to ask Audrey about her favorite trends in paper and stationery and her predictions for upcoming trends…
One thing I am loving (that you at Smock are brilliant for) is the mixing and matching of patterns and colors! Patterned backings, patterned envelope liners, and even folios. I adore the trend of mixing things up without being “matchy-matchy.” There is a way to do this to add a stylized touch, without losing the simplicity and elegance of a clean modern design. As far as the next big thing, I think blind deboss and edge painting will be getting a lot more attention next year as well as unexpected accents…details such as scalloped edges, glassine wraps, and hand accent details like stitching or hand stamping.
If you were invited to the White House for dinner, what would you wear?
Good question – this could change weekly! Right now at this moment I am feeling like I would want to go tailored and classic with a hint of forward style. I envision a mid-length dress with a deep v, and an unexpected asymmetrical detail. Fabric covered buttons down the back and for color, it would have to be an interesting solid neutral like a taupey gold or black plum. I just kind of made this up in my head, so I’m not sure where I could find my imaginary dress, but I am thinking it could be a cross between Juliette Hogan and Milly. To finish off the look I would go with peep toe pumps and pretty, simple jewelry.
What are your top pick destinations for first time visitors to Venice?
I think all visitors should check out the Venice Canals. The city is called Venice because it was built on the canals to resemble Venice Italy in the early 1900’s. It was a resort town and termed “The Coney Island of the Pacific”. Today the canals are full of beautiful homes and modern garden landscaping. There are little boats everywhere; it is charming and a mini escape from the city. Must do’s would include, walk Abbot Kinney Blvd and go bike-riding down the bike path along the ocean. Abbot Kinney Blvd is the upscale and eclectic shopping street in Venice where Urbanic is located. I love our block. It is full of shops, restaurants, art galleries and design firms. The street has a reputation for being forward, creative and alternative. The bike path is just good old fashioned fun.
Where are your favorite places to shop?
Mostly I love exploring new areas in different cities with boutique streets kind of like ours. I love the experience of walking into a shop or bakery when you can feel that proprietor poured their heart and soul into the business. The little details are everything! Going into Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters is always a treat for obvious reasons. I am completely blown away by how talented their design and merchandising team is. When I am in NYC, I love peeking into the store windows and trekking around all the different parts of the city. ABC Carpet is one of my faves!
Thank you, Audrey, for sharing with us – we can’t wait to come visit when we make it to California!
At Smock, it truly never ceases to be incredibly exciting for us to be featured in some of our favorite publications. So you can imagine how thrilled we were to be featured in a recent issue of Inside Weddings, one of our favorite wedding magazines. Our Haddington letterpress wedding invitations were featured, showcasing our love for calligraphy and fabulous patterned envelope liners.
Natural Home featured some of our letterpress greeting cards, which are sustainably printed on our bamboo paper and paired with cute patterned envelopes.
The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article about cool papers including Smock’s bamboo paper and showcased one of our letterpress birthday cards.
Smock was also mentioned in a cute piece in Victoria Magazine featuring great business cards and calling cards. Our Smock letterpress business cards were featured alongside some other fabulous calling card designs.
Thank you to our friends at Inside Weddings, Natural Home, Victoria Magazine and The Wall Street Journal for mentioning Smock! It’s an honor to be included.
Working with incredible retailers across the country and internationally is, hands down, the best part about what we do at Smock. They keep us inspired and energized and looking forward to creating imaginative, sustainably printed letterpress for customers worldwide. One store in particular that continues to amaze us is Urbanic Paper Boutique and their fabulous blog Parcel Post, where owner Audrey Woollen routinely feature a glimpse into life at Urbanic and the great paper products they carry. We’re always delighted when Smock products pop up in their weekly Friday at the Shop feature and have found ourselves continually loving the great photos they’ve taken of our 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap.
All of our gift wraps are double-sided, printed with bright festive patterns that coordinate with many of our letterpress greeting cards and letterpress gift tags. Later this week, we’ll be featuring Urbanic in our Smock Store Spotlight feature so be sure to stop back for all the behind the scenes details of one of our favorite paper shops!
{Photos by Urbanic for Parcel Post.}
With the holidays swiftly approaching, we were recently contacted by two of our fabulous Smock retailers about contributing some Smock goodies for holiday events being hosted at their stores. Naturally, we couldn’t resist getting in on the holiday action. At Smock, we believe in giving back at the holidays and throughout the year so we were excited for the opportunity to help our stores out this holiday season.
We sent these little bundles, featuring a few of our letterpress holiday cards and letterpress gift tags, to our friends at Salutations in North Carolina where they were hosting a holiday open house at each of their stores in Charlotte and Chapel Hill. Guests to the event had to bring non-perishable food items to donate to the local food pantry in order to gain admittance to the event. We’re delighted to have been a part of such a fabulous event!
We also happily sent some of our double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap and letterpress gift tags to Broadway Paper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Broadway Paper’s holiday open house is being held this Saturday, November 14th – you can visit their website and the Broadway Paper blog for more details if you’re in Wisconsin and would like to attend.
What are you doing to get in the holiday spirit? We’d love to hear about the fabulous events you’re hosting or attending this holiday season!
When Smock’s Master Calligraphy, Debi Zeinert of The Blooming Quill, welcomed a new granddaughter this summer, we were positively thrilled for her and her family. It was a true honor and a pleasure for us to print these beautiful custom letterpress baby announcements to welcome baby Natalia into the world. Perfect for welcoming a little baby girl, this customization was based on our pink Lamby greeting card and features lovely hand calligraphy on the inside from Debi herself. The baby lamb motif featured on this card is available through our new Social Occasions album, released earlier this year, so you can mix and match motifs, colors, patterns, and fonts to create the perfect baby announcement or social stationery to celebrate any occasion. This letterpress baby announcement was such a joy to print – we look forward to printing many more!
If I wasn’t running a letterpress invitation company, I would love to be Nicholas Kristof. He’s an editorial writer for the NY Times who is a wonderful example of using one’s life – and job – to bring about concrete change in the world. One of his focuses has been bringing attention to women’s plights around the world – childhood prostitution, for instance, or the crazy high mortality rates for women in childbirth, or the lack of education of girls. He writes, “In the 19th Century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. ‘Women hold up half the sky,’ in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.” What a guy. How can we, as women, not care about this?
His latest column in last Sunday’s paper deals with those suffering from obstetric fistulas – 3 to 4 million women in Asia and Africa, often injured in childbirth while teenagers because they gave birth before their pelvises were fully grown. After giving birth, a young woman with obstetric fistulas is “incontinent,” Kristof writes, “steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.” These young women are then usually abandoned by their husbands – “scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.” And to repair their bodies and their lives? A $300 surgery that takes 20 minutes. Wow.
I’m coming at this three months after an amazing birth of my second child, a birth complete with a doula and a midwife at a local birthing center. It makes me think if I wasn’t running an invitation company, I would love to go back to medical school, learn stuff, and then help women in this way. But – I don’t have a medical degree, can’t do medical school right now, so what I can do is this. We’re running a free invitation envelope printing promotion through Smock. Buy a letterpress invitation set, get free envelope printing on your outer envelopes through December 31, 2009. This saves you about $300 for a quantity of 100 invitations. Sure, you can pocket the money, or use it to buy some nice organic sheets, or shoes, or books, or – you can donate the savings to the Worldwide Fistula Fund (or pick another cause that you care about) and really make a difference in someone’s life. Even if you’re not shopping for invitations – make a difference, forgo that Starbucks coffee for a while, and then make a donation. Read more about what you can do to help those suffering from fistula on Nicholas Kristof’s blog.
When we print letterpress dinner menus, we can’t help but marvel over the great food we know guests are going to deilght in enjoying – cinnamon and port wine poached anjou pear? Sounds declicious! Brought to us by Aileen’s Invitations in Miami, this letterpress menu is our Kurai design printed in rich raspberry ink. The vertical orientation, in combination with the border around the edges, makes this customization quite different from the original design. This customization is the definition of sophisticated elegance.
A big thank you to our lovely friends at Aileen’s Invitations for allowing us the pleasure of printing these great letterpress menus!
Earlier this month, Smock was excited for the opportunity to contribute some of our fun letterpress greeting cards to goody bags handed out to guests at the recent Rubie Green event at Calypso Home in New York City. Rubie Green, a line of incredibly stylish organic upholstery textiles and bedding, was created by Michelle Adams who is the former editor of Domino magazine so it was a thrill for us to contribute to an event that was both fabulously chic, but also wonderfully eco-minded. This was such a great opportunity to introduce Smock to some new friends!
First of all, it has to be noted that the Calypso store provided a beautiful backdrop for this event…
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Here at Smock, we absolutely love Stationery Trends a fabulous trade magazine dedicated to all things stationery and paper. This year we were thrilled to be featured in Stationery Trends several times, including a piece about our double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap in our Calliope design in the winter issue…
In May, with the National Stationery Show fast approaching and just in time for Smock’s first birthday, we were completely excited to see one of our letterpress birthday cards, our Happy Happy Birthday to You card, on the cover of the spring 2009 issue of Stationery Trends! Coincidentally, the magazine was also celebrating their first birthday and wanted to showcase a great birthday card on the cover. We’re sincerely honored that they chose one of ours! Inside that same issue, they also showcased a beautiful customization of one of our letterpress wedding invitation designs, Rhon, which we printed as a letterpress bat mitzvah invitation.
Thank you so much to the folks at Stationery Trends for a great publication and for continually supporting Smock!
Niki Kantor Rubin, proprietress of Papery & Cakery in Boca Raton, Florida brings a unique background to her unique business, a stationery and patisserie boutique. With an educational background in history and a law degree from George Washington University, Niki began her career clerking for a criminal judge. From the beginning, her law practice failed to be completely satisfying and she had never shaken her lifelong passion for design, art and creating. Then a few years ago she starting planning her wedding to her “camp sweetheart” – they met while both working as counselors at a summer camp nearly a decade ago – and realized how much she loved planning all of the stationery and paper details that they incorporated in their celebration. Along the way, she met the owner of the stationery store that is now Papery & Cakery – one thing led to another and when Niki was offered the opportunity to buy the store she did so. And she never looked back.
These days, Niki loves working with clients to create the stationery of their dreams. Unlike her days in law practice, she’s now inspired by what she does and feels lucky to help people celebrate the special occasions in their lives. Niki shares, “I’m inspired by everything around me. Florida weather is truly amazing. We live near the ocean and walk our golden retriever [and Papery & Cakery mascot], Ray, to the beach almost daily. I try to carry environmentally friendly vendors, like Smock for all of my clients. I’m a magazine junkie, and get butterflies when Martha Stewart arrives in the mail. There is so much to see on the web, I try to keep up with the blogging world, and keep my blog contemporary and chic.”
We’ve mentioned it before, but in addition to all things paper and letterpress, here at Smock we have a pretty deeply rooted love for yummy treats, too. The Papery & Cakery blog is one of our favorite reads because it celebrates two of our favorite things – stationery and delicious sweets. Each week, Niki’s sister Ali, who was a pastry student when Niki launched Papery & Cakery and is now a freelance baker in New York City, shares her inspired recipes in her Cakery Friday feature. Last week, she showcased her recipe for festive pumpkin spice marshmallows, which Ali and Niki were sweet enough to share here on the Smock blog…
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