Paper Sky {Wedding Invitations}

Paper Sky is the creative love child of Jessica and Tim (but mostly Jessica). Years ago when I was just a fledgling photographer I shot a wedding in which Jessica was the Matron of honor. Since then we have bumped into each other from Uptown to downtown where her beautiful storefront is now located. I have been thrilled to watch her business grow and flourish in such a short time. She is making a big difference in the wedding industry here in San Luis Obispo and is making the town a more colorful place to live and even shop. Anna and I really enjoyed our time hearing all of the details that make Paper Sky such a beautiful reality. Enjoy the interview!

How did you get into this? How did you start making invitations?
It has really been this huge evolving thing. Ive always loved paper because its inexpensive and you can do so much with it. Basically, Tim and I got engaged and I wanted to make our own invitations. I worked at Hands Gallery {located across the street} all through college. I was an anatomy physiology major at Poly, but I had an alter ego creative side and they really let me explore that there. I was allowed to do displays in the windows and I began to buy for them at shows in San Francisco. It just opened up my world to really artistic stuff and people. This {location} came up for sale and my old boss at Hands told us we needed to jump on it. It quickly fell into our laps and everything clicked that I really loved paper and color and it was completely meant to be. It was awesome; it still is awesome! {laughs}



Has this been an outlet for your creativity?
Absolutely; huge amazing creative outlet for me! I’m always learning and I’m always evolving. Especially on the wedding invitation side. I get really excited to sit down with a new bride and we ask, ‘What are we going to come up with?’ I love that initial blank screen design process. I don’t think that it will ever get old to me because it’s new every time. Even just doing the window display. You can pretty much make anything with paper. Its fun to come up with new themes and new ways to dress that window and we always get really great feedback from the community about it and it puts a big smile on my face. Anna: Ive never seen anybody do with paper what you do!

What is the wedding invitation design process like?
I meet a couple by appointment. I tell them to bring in as much inspiring stuff as they can, whether it be color swatches, magazine clippings, how they got engaged, where they are getting married, how they met. Kinda like the tattoo Save the dates I made. The groom proposed to his bride with ‘Forever?’ and ‘Yes or No’ boxes tattooed to his leg. Every invitation becomes a story about them and its really neat to make it unique to that couple. I think that’s the service that everybody’s looking for; something that’s custom to them. We will typically meet and start talking, drawing and getting conceptual shapes down on paper. Couples can be overwhelmed with a blank slate, so to not freak them out we start with shape. Do you like a circle or square? And we slowly build from there.

{design center}

Do you give comps so that couples can pick what they like once you have begun on a design?
If its an in-house process we will do PDF comps to get the layout and design right. Then we will do a hard copy proof where everything is assembled together. Once the couples give the final OK then they sign off on it and we go to print.

How much time do you need to design a custom invitation?
Ideally, we need about a month because the design process is pretty involved. To get what is in their minds eye into my computer is kinda tricky. Its totally a symbiotic thing. The more we can communicate and make changes that faster we can get what a couple wants. We have a lot of couples that are actually out of state, which requires more emailing back and forth.


What were you like as a child creatively?
I was that quiet introverted child that sat there playing with crayons, markers and paper; always drawing. All my first presents were paint sets. Every Christmas I would get a new art medium. I got my first acrylic set when I was probably like 6. My parents were always really supportive of that but when it came to going to school and deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up artist wasn’t really allowed I guess. I was also really good at science so I became a bio major. When I was younger I always said I was going to be a pediatrician that drew cartoons for my patients. That was always my ideal job.

Are you able to work with any budget?
Yeah, definitely. We can do as much or as little as the couple wants or can afford. If a bride wants to do part of the assembly we can cut costs. That’s how all of this really started. Tim and I wanted to have really cool wedding invitations but we didn’t want to spend a fortune and I knew that I could create and assemble it on my own.

If Paper Sky were an animal what kind of an animal would it be?
It would be a peacock because I am so inspired and turned on by color and love putting different colors together. My favorite thing about this entire store is that wall of paper. I could stare at it all day long just like I could stare at a peacock all day long with its plums and iridescent colors.


What are your plans as far as growth and expansion?
That’s the funny thing! This is the question that Tim and I have to revisit all the time. People come into the store and say we should open a store in such-and-such, but that’s not my heart. I think the pace we are going at now is great, but if it gets any bigger, we need to rethink some stuff. I don’t want to sell stuff online because I want people to come into the store and have an experience. The wedding invite thing is shockingly taking off and we didn’t anticipate it being that successful. Our location is awesome being downtown and I love it being small and personal.

What sets you apart from other invitation companies in the wedding industry?
Because we can meet face to face with a bride and groom and get to know them and create something totally unique for them. Where as other companies you just flip through a book and point out what you want. I worked for a time with a coordinator where I went through him as a middle man and it just didn’t work, because I never met the actual couple. Its just such a different thing when you meet people and see how their eyes light up because of a certain color or idea. I helps me get a good sense of their style.

What is an ideal wedding client for you?
Ideal is like Lindsey Kennedy. She was so easy to work with and so inspiring because she had really great ideas. She actually participated in a lot of the assembly of her invitations because she wanted to cut costs. Basically my ideal clients are people who get really excited about paper and the design process in general and believe that the possibilities are endless. People who are open to stepping outside of that structured wedding invitation box and really into being different and getting creative.

So I decided it would be awesome to get feedback from Lindsey on her experience working with Jessica to obtain her wedding invitation dream. This is what she shared with me.

“Working with Jess at Paper Sky for our wedding invites was not only memorable, but enjoyable. Jessica listened to what artistic elements we wanted involved, conceptualized them into a neat little format that I could visualize and respond to, and she made me feel at ease and totally involved in the whole process. I was inspired by my visit to her store and actually based the artwork on the front of our invitation off a handmade journal I purchased there. Our invitations were a little bit of everything (organza ribbon, sewing, silk twine, textured fiber paper from Nepal, photography, vintage-inspired shape and feel, and poetic nuances of text) and Jessica helped us create art, not just a wedding-day memento, out of discrete elements. Jessica, you are truly a gem. Thank you for making this process truly awesome.”

{This was Lindseys wedding invitation}

Paper Sky Contact Information:
papersky(at)sbcglobal.net / 805.545.9940 / 778 Higuera St. San Luis Obispo, CA. 93405
Website: Paper Sky