ILOOTPAPERIE: Celebrating 15 Years Of Cheeky Stationery
|
|
Time to read 8 min
Have an account?
Log in to check out faster.
|
|
Time to read 8 min
Founders of ILOOTPAPERIE
We're sisters Alice and Doris Lieu, founders of ILOOTPAPERIE, a cheeky stationery and gifts company fueled by our love of paper goods, funny drawings, and a keen appreciation for puns and word play. With our rescue pups Sylvester and Rocky (and angel Sparks) in tow, we live and work out of our home studio in Pasadena, California where pun-filled illustrations spring to life and there are many a late night spent hand-packing our gifty goods with care.
We were born two years apart, though friends and acquaintances alike are often surprised to discover this as we hang out together quite a bit, i.e. when I promoted parties for 10+ years in LA, we'd often be out and about in each other's company every weekend! We are blessed to be able to stand a great deal of one another, this superpower of ours comes in handy! Come December, it will be 15 years since we first launched our stationery company.
Our adventures in the stationery world actually started with creating custom wedding invitations for some of our close friends. We quickly found that what delighted us most was designing the accompanying thank you cards we included with the invitations as part of our gift to the couple. That realization shaped the beginnings of ILOOTPAPERIE when we launched in December 2010 as a passion project with just six designs on Etsy, which we both worked on during our free time outside of our day jobs.
At the end of August 2013, after surviving rounds of layoffs due to the company restructuring, Alice was finally laid off from her job in Marketing and Design at a shoe design company. This set off an unexpected course of events in which we eventually decided she would apply her full-time effort to help grow the company. Keeping in mind the advice of our entrepreneurial friends — that few part-time projects can take off without full-time attention applied to it — we embarked on this ever-challenging but endlessly fulfilling journey with ILOOTPAPERIE. We have found ourselves to be a part of a very special industry filled with fantastically talented kindred spirits that we have the honor of working amongst and calling our friends. Doris continues to work at her finance day job, in addition to ILOOTPAPERIE, so we often joked during our first 8 years, there was 1 and a 1/4 of us getting things done!
We are proud of our tenacity and problem-solving skills to continue to face various challenges that come with being a creator and card maker that we could not even begin to anticipate when we started this journey almost 15 years ago. We try hard to remember to celebrate our accomplishments and remind ourselves of them from time to time, as we never even dreamed of being able to work with so many of our partners we do now to have our goods in the curation of so beautiful shops all around the world, and in places we've never been, or have an illustrated book all about Sisterhood ("Sisters: Better Together" with Hachette Book Group/Workman Publishing) in book and gift stores - what a wild adventure it all continues to be!
We believe what continues to shine through in our cards and goods and sets us apart is how much fun we have when we are coming up with our card designs, and the sincerity we pour into all we do. There are lots of earnest laughs and heartfelt emotions behind our concepts. Even the vetoed concepts tend to make at least one of us giggle while we try to sell it to the other person. We aim to have a good time with it and to never take any of it for granted and believe that that’s what makes our products memorable. That this shared laughter and connection extends beyond just the two of us is a gift. We are always delighted to find what speaks to us, speaks to others as well - this is a sense of connection that inspires us to keep showing up. The idea that something we created could bring a bit of cheer or comfort to fellow kindred spirits no matter the distance that separates us, keeps us going.
We thoroughly enjoy wordplay and a good pun, or even better two! And we like to think because Alice was born on Labor Day and Doris was born near the Thanksgiving holiday, we were born to pun.
Growing up as Chinese Americans (ABCs!) and with the Mandarin (and Taiwanese!) language spoken in the family (our grandparents are from Taiwan and mainland China), we came to the realization recently as Alice relied heavily on listening to Cdramas to stay awake illustrating for long stretches while completing our Sisters book during the pandemic: there has always been wordplay all around us. We've grown up with ingrained traditional Chinese beliefs, for example - that certain numbers, ie 8 "ba" are considered to be lucky and the reason behind this was that when spoken, the characters sound phonetically like a lucky word or phrase, "fa" in this case which is the pronunciation of the character that means to generate wealth. This homophonous play on words is absolutely at the root of our fondness for punning. And if we can manage to double pun in a design, then we achieve what we affectionately call Doris' scrabble effect, where she decimates her opponents with a well-placed short word utilizing both high-scoring tiles and placement to complete two words in one move.
All this is very much reflected in our designs as we always are tickled about being able to combine our love of wordplay with Alice's illustrations of subject matters we have enduring soft spots for, from our love of snail mail to food (our much-beloved Love You From My Head To-Ma-Toes Mother's Day card), to funny animals (our Slow Clap Sloth Congrats), to pop culture (our Lovely Lady Puns collection celebrating powerful women and women artists like Yayoi Kusama), and to everything in between! Brightness, nostalgia, and connection with a dash of cheekiness are reoccurring core themes in our work. Creating our collections continues to be a cathartic process and often captures a range of our own emotions in response to everything that has been happening in our immediate realities (a lot has been happening friends!!)
"A highlight of our day is when we spot a bit of our washi tapes, stickers, or even our packaging woven within someone's treasured album, sketchbook, Traveler's or Hobonichi journal."
Alice brings our concepts to life visually - but as much as we would love to just focus on card making and the creative work of pushing a concept to production, the reality of owning a small business means you are actually concurrently working on various responsibilities all at once. In addition to finding time to think solely about illustrating the card concepts, and then actually illustrating - there are other tasks vying for her attention related to marketing/social media, maintaining our retail and wholesale online shop platforms, customer service, managing production issues (dealing with tariffs!!) and so much more!
Like many other small business owners, we still struggle to find enough time in the day to get everything that we would like to get done completed as there’s an ever-growing list of to-dos that need to be balanced with the fun we like to squish in, the art we’d like to create, and other life obligations that can’t be ignored for long. We feel lucky to have been able to bring on two of our artist friends part-time to our team, to focus primarily on helping us in wholesale fulfillment with Doris coordinating. This had helped us move a bit toward our goal of achieving certain efficiencies in our processes to build more bandwidth and
balance.
But it is all definitely still a work in progress, especially as we have found that while we naturally knew to work hard and play hard - ultimately we needed to learn to rest hard too. There are more organization goals that we are hoping to implement to problem-solve our home studio space limitations and workflow tools that we can continue to explore when we have a little more time on our hands (the irony!).
Putting a pen to paper can lead to the creation of infinite outcomes! - a doodle, a map, directions to a new destination, plans for the future, an illustration,a blueprint, a poem, and of course a letter penned on a card, a postcard! to a loved one. At the core of what we create, greeting cards, we work in a medium that lends itself to spark this tangible act of connection and creation.
Email has its place in the world, but snail mail is communication on a tactile level. An analog gesture of joy breaking through in a now often digital world of overwhelm. We love being in an industry that encourages people to stop and take time to reach out in such a way that lets the other person know you've taken a pause in the blur of the day in and day out to think of them. They can feel the care you've sent embedded in the weight and texture of the paper they physically hold in their hands.
That effort to pen down your thoughts for them is not taken for granted. When you do take time to make that connection, you realize that a bit of effort (or a lot depending on the type of writer you are!) can make a big impact in someone's day and yours. It's magic. We have always believed and still firmly believe snail mail is the best mail.
In the last year or so, through online friends and in-person stationery focused festivals curated by our beloved stationery shop partners and friends in the community, we've been introduced to the world of Junk Journaling and as fellow ephemera enthusiasts who still have old concert ticket stubs from 10-15 years ago, it's been thrilling to witness this shared enthusiasm for stationery goods and the physical capture of bits and bobs from experiences and travels! We love this new iteration of how the community pulls together all these different elements to collage striking collections of their memories and trips in their journals.
Thank you so much for allowing us to share a little snippet of our cheeky universe, On Waverly Team! We love so much being a part of your shop's thoughtful curation. You can follow along in our day-to-day shenanigans on IG @ILOOTPAPERIE or shop our goods on www.ilootpaperie.patternbyetsy.com. We would be tickled to talk stationery with an E with you all in real life at Chicago Stationery Fest in March 2026.
Spread love like you would butter, generously!
