10 years of Clementine Studio
A long (sorry!) and very honest reflection with the highs, lows and what-nows
It’s September 3rd, my 10 year biz-iversary of Clementine Studio. When I hit my 5 year anniversary I made an illustration (below) to commemorate it. I remember I thought about throwing a party and how if and when I made it to 10 years I would definitely have a full-blown celebration, one that Domino magazine would probably throw for me to feature in their magazine, Clementine Studio now being a sought-after household name, of course.
Throughout the last decade there have been 2 sides of myself constantly at battle, one that I often consider to have “failed” at business and doesn’t deserve to be here celebrating 10 years, and the other side is like the tortoise in the race, quiet contentment and playing the long game.
The Start
This birthday feels anticlimactic and honestly a little depressing to that first side of me that feels like I failed. My career looks a lot different today than where I pictured I’d be in 10 years when I started it in 2014. But the context of that time is important to note: I was working full-time at an art tech startup in NYC, the Brooklyn design scene was booming- books like Brooklyn Makers, Design Brooklyn and sites like Design Sponge were highlighting the maker renaissance happening across the East River from my apartment and I devoured it all. Instagram was new and exciting, blogs were just hitting their stride, it was a really electrifying and glass-ceiling-breaking moment in time for artists and makers who, all of a sudden, didn’t need the gatekeepers of galleries and commercial buyers in order to make a living off their work. I idolized the creators, women entrepreneurs and artists I read about it Matchbook and Domino Magazines. Every Wednesday I religiously read Grace Bonney’s weekly column “Biz Ladies” on Design Sponge. It was so expansive for me to read those stories and it became an obsession that I wanted to build my own creative life on my own terms. In 2013 I had already started watercolor painting and selling prints on my website outside of my 9-5. I found some early success with the site Hunter’s Alley which was an off-shoot of One Kings Lane. My prints sold like wildfire there and I was running to FedEx before work to ship orders and sprinting to the print store near NYU after work to pick up prints. It was exhilarating and encouraging as a jumping off point.
That same year, my sister got engaged and I illustrated their save the date card. It’s embarrassingly bad when I look at it now, but it generated a lot of interest from her guests and friends and I started getting more inquiries for custom work. I took a day off of work in June of 2014 to plot my official business: Clementine Studio, semi-custom wedding invitations. I designed 4 templates, found a printing company in midtown that agreed to give me wholesale pricing, I set up my website for free through Wix where a former coworker of mine had just started working, I stood on my couch and photographed the invitation suites styled in a very 2014 manner on top of my coffee table, I teased it to my 25 followers on instagram, and was off to the races on 9/3/14 right after Labor Day….which was dumb timing lol, but I’m impatient.
Early wins
The next few years went well, I was getting a lot of wedding work because I knew a lot friends, friends-of-friends, family friends, that were getting married and word of mouth was my best referral. I think I paid for advertising on The Knot that first year but other than that I never had to do paid marketing thanks to Instagram and word of mouth from people who had seen my invitation on their friends’ fridge. My sister worked at Birchbox at that time and was able to connect me to some cool illustration jobs like creating custom stationery, menus and live-illustrating for their pop-up events. A friend of mine connected me to the website YouBeauty where I got a recurring gig illustrating their articles. I got my first press feature in Martha Stewart Weddings in 2016. I worked with trendy up-and-comers in fashion at the time like Reece Hudson and Frieda & Nellie.
Mid lows
It continued to chug along from there, but I really struggled with comparison and I was never riding high. I wasn’t getting the Design Sponge or Domino features, I didn’t have a shared studio with other artists and designers like other entrepreneurs I looked up to had. I really tried with Instagram, posting every day which meant creating new work just to share there for several years which completely burnt me out and felt inauthentic. Being an introvert and trying to build a company by yourself turns out, is really hard. I couldn’t talk to the camera on instagram to build engagement (I tried one or two times and crawled into a hole for the following week from a cringe hangover) but my following slowly and steadily grew, until it abruptly stopped when Instagram stopped showing my work to my audience (a frustration I at least share with other creatives).
Career highlights
Regardless, it was still the way most people were finding my work and press features did trickle in here and there. I’ve had a lot of “cool” illustration projects, a standout being in 2019 when I had the opportunity to illustrate the Architectural Digest’s Design Show room for Sasha Bikoff and my illustrations were blown up into murals at the event, that I got to attend! That was a career highlight. Most importantly I got to illustrate hundreds of wedding invitations which really is an honor for me, I love doing it and don’t take it lightly when people trust me to bring that to life. I’ve also made lasting relationships with a lot of my clients and have been able to create custom illustrations for their nursery or kitchens or pets or new businesses. I did get a few notable features, my favorite being Cup of Jo who I’ve idolized since 2009. I hosted corporate workshops, illustrated for big brands (and a few celebs!), illustrated at live events, partnered with several philanthropic organizations that I really believe in and collaborated with local companies whose relationships mean a lot to me.
In 2020 when I expected my business to plummet, it did the opposite. I posted that I was creating free, digital “save-the-new-date” cards for my current wedding clients and offered to do it for free for anyone else who needed it. ABC7 Chicago picked it up and I ended up designing nearly 150 digital designs for couples around the country. I also hosted a few very informal drawing classes on instagram-live and sold out of several mini painting series that I created. People were eager to support and it was the time I felt most connected to the audience I had built on there. It lead me to launch my sister site Clementine To Go that allowed me to offer more affordable templated-invitation suites. I just shut this site down last month actually, it was a beautiful site and I’m really proud of it but it ended up being not very financially viable.
Crash and burn (not to be dramatic…)
Subsequently, 2021 and 2022 were the biggest wedding years I had because of all those rescheduled weddings. I made the most money in 2022 that I ever had and I remember feeling incredibly bittersweet about it, because I was pregnant. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up the momentum the following year, nobody else worked for me and there’s no paid maternity leave for solo-preneurs (don’t get me started). Sure enough, despite me preparing as best as I possibly could, 2023 knocked me on my ass business wise. Motherhood too, of course, but the added pressure of trying to keep my business afloat while not having any new work to show for it and zero mental capacity to maintain it, really threw me for a loop. It was brutal to feel like I was finally reaching my stride only to have it all burn down. I’ve never felt that alone or bitter in business before, I always enjoyed working by myself until I had nobody else to support my work for me and my clients virtually vanished. I also happened to be aging out of wedding-word-of-mouth, so I had to fight for new wedding business for the first time ever but with about 25% of the gumption I once had. We uprooted from Chicago where Clementine Studio had really found it’s legs for 8 years after launching in NYC, and moved to Denver in the middle of last summer with no childcare set up for months. We also had some close family losses that rocked me on both my side and my husband’s, it was a rough time for me and I felt like I had really failed as a business owner on top of it all.
So, that’s the first part of me that I mentioned earlier. I’m not having the 10th birthday celebration that I initially dreamed of 10 years ago. I don’t have the kind of success I thought I might have at this point. The online world has drastically changed and it’s made it a lot harder to stand out and be noticed, and to be honest I’m just not up for that kind of competition anymore.
New beginnings
Which is why it felt important to me to sit down and write a recap of the last decade. It’s proven to be a helpful practice in making me realize what I have accomplished. The things that have come true and lasted are the authentic reasons that I wanted to start a business and work for myself in the first place, the rest were just ego fantasies. Having kids felt foreign to me when I was 26 but I remember thinking how when the time came, working for myself would afford me the flexibility to not have to choose between a career and raising kids and that much is technically true at least. I do have to choose of course because my business is at about 50% of what it was since having Max, but I choose to take 2 days of the work week to have him at home with me and have figured out how to work smarter and not harder on those 3 days I do get to work. It’s not always ideal and I’m stressed a lot about work but I’m so grateful to have more time with him at home (although if you ask me this on a Monday when he’s been home with me for 4 days straight this would be a different answer).
I’ve also spent a lot of the last two years working on a new career extension: picture books! I haven’t talked about it much because I haven’t wanted to put any outside pressure on this venture since I’m really passionate about wanting to shift more towards this in the future and I’ve realized that picture books are really where it all started for me. Where a lot of this past decade has felt forced, this feels very natural and the most authentically aligned with what I want to do with my career and I feel excited for the first time in a long time. I’ll be sharing more about this soon!
This was cathartic to write down and if you’re still here, thank you for reading and for supporting my work and my highs and lows. I’m really grateful for all of the opportunities I’ve had and the people I’ve gotten to work with and while it hasn’t been perfect, I’ve really loved building it and am excited to see what the next decade brings.
The ebbs and flows of work and dreams and motherhood are so real… as is the impatience to share your work with the world (I LOLed at your Labor Day memory bc I can totally relate)! Thank you for sharing all of this; it’s refreshing and helpful and just what I needed to read ☺️
Also, look at all you’ve done!! 💪🏻
It’s crazy how much of my story I see in yours . Can’t wait to order the picture book!