Lauren Gryniewski

Tell me about your time in advertising. How did you get started and why did you leave?

I fell into advertising in college after bouncing around majors from architecture (seemed like an interest but not a passion), to pre-med (seemed too hard), to film (seemed too risky), when I decided to try some advertising classes. It seemed like I could make mini movies and provided a more surefire career path than film. This was right around 2000 and advertising was still the just basic media forms of tv, print, and radio, and commercials were still becoming part of the cultural lexicon. Think Budwiser “Wassup?” and “Got Milk?” times. (If you’re that old, like me.) Simpler times, for sure. 

I thought it would be a good idea to get an internship at an agency before I got too far down this new path of college classes to make sure advertising is something I’d like as a career. I went to school at the University of Miami in Florida. Not a big ad town, but there was a (then) mid-sized agency of about 70 people called Crispin Porter + Bogusky. I got an interview and marched in there in my business suit and oversized portfolio with charcoal drawings of nudes and such from my art classes. Totally clueless. But nonetheless, I walked out of that meeting with a job—one that paid $15/day, but that seemed generous to me for an internship. They told me that this funny little car called the MINI Cooper was coming to the US the next year and they wanted an intern to help out on all things for that account as they launched the brand.

So I shuffled all my classes around to be only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and went into CP+B on the other three days. It was an amazingly inspiring time to be there. They pitched and won IKEA. They pitched and won Molson. And they were doing all sorts of interesting things for MINI that were nothing like I’d ever seen done in advertising before. The people who worked there were young and fun, and I couldn’t wait to be done with school so I could start working full time too. The internship let me try out all the agency departments and that’s when I decided I wanted to be an art director. Agency mentors helped me get pointed toward ad schools and I went to the VCU Brandcenter (then Adcenter) after I graduated in 2003.

I met my future husband, Joel, a copywriter, at VCU and we became a creative team. After we graduated, we worked at a now defunct agency in Seattle. When they lost a big account and we felt it was time to make our next move, new jobs took us to San Francisco, but due to timing and job availability, we ended up working at different agencies. 

I took a job at Venables Bell and was thriving there. Joel’s agency was not as great of a fit, and he left, not exactly sure what was next. One night I was working late at the office with my partner, as you often do in your 20s, and decided to take a break and peruse a newly popular website, Craigslist. I happened upon an antique letterpress printing press. 

As Joel and I were dating, we loved finding creative greeting cards for each other, particularly if we could find something that was well crafted and high quality, like a nice letterpress-printed card. We sometimes ruminated about starting our own greeting card company. We had the skill sets of art and writing, after all. The press was only $500 and came with a cabinet and some type, and I sent the link to Joel without much of a plan. 

I had no idea that the little old press, which could only print a tiny area up to 5 ”x 7”, would lead to my exit from advertising.

What are you doing now? 

In 2007, we took some printmaking classes to learn how to use our press, and started brainstorming ideas for cards. That year, we also formed a business entity, formally called Old Tom Foolery’s Bric-A-Brac, and took a trip to New York to walk the greeting card industry’s biggest trade show, the National Stationery Show. We met some great people there and loved the friendly, welcoming vibe of the industry, which seemed a sharp contrast to the competitive nature of the advertising industry.

After determining that our favorite concept for a card collection “hadn’t been done,” we created a set of 52 cards, each a simple statement followed by an asterisk and a footnote at the bottom. The concept was a play on the many simple letterpress cards on the market that just said something like “I love you” with no twist, and the design was guided by the fact that it had to be relatively simple to print because we were printmaking novices and our press was so small.

Getting this collection off the ground in time to launch our business at the National Stationery Show in 2008 was no small feat. Joel had luckily found an agency that would let him work only two days a week, so he had some time to devote to some of the logistics while I tried to fit in our Old Tom Foolery work alongside my full-time job at Venables. But I was spending the majority of my time on production in LA, and it was getting nearly impossible to find any significant time to do what we needed to get the business up and running. These days, it’s a viable path to start with direct-to-consumer sales online, but at that time, Etsy was brand new and selling online via your own website was still a pretty new thing. Our best option for quick success was to try to connect with as many wholesale accounts as possible—ideally both chains and boutiques—and find some sales reps. And that meant exhibiting in New York in May. 

To make our deadline, I had to quit my job at Venables. At that time, I fully thought I’d be back at an ad job as soon as the card business was a smoothly running machine. We made the scary leap of only living on Joel’s two-day-a-week income, which thankfully also covered our health insurance, and hoped for the best. 

Everything that could have possibly gone wrong before the trade show did. But we made it there, set up a bare bones booth, and introduced our 52 little babies to the stationery world. It was exhilarating and exhausting but we loved it, and after investing several thousands of dollars by scraping funds together to get to the show, we walked away with eight. Small. Orders. Like $100-$300 size orders. But we got lots of business cards and met some sales reps and went back to San Francisco, where we eagerly anticipated the sound of the fax machine printing out tons of orders coming in. The faxes did come, and we even got an occasional order by email or phone, but it was slow growth for sure. 

We needed more money, so I freelanced a bit, and then BBDO SF agreed to hire me to come in Mon/Wed/Fri, so I could spend the other days working on Old Tom Foolery. As our account list grew, we realized this tiny press that only printed one card at a time (in our kitchen, no less) was not going to cut it. So we started outsourcing the printing to a local letterpress printer, which resulted in a huge snafu and major expense before fairly smooth sailing for a while. 

I remember telling a friend at work that I was sure that if we could just get into Paper Source we’d be SET. But then we did get into Paper Source, and while we definitely weren’t “set,” it was still exciting. And then we got into other big chains like Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, and Papyrus, and launched a non-letterpress line to reach a lower price point market, and soon our apartment was a packed little warehouse that smelled like cardboard and ink.

We were running out of space, and living on an income of a three-day-a-week job and a two-day-a-week job, plus maybe a tiny bit of profit from the business. Instead of renting expensive warehouse space in San Francisco, we decided to move to Joel’s home state of Minnesota in 2010 and find a house that had a basement we could dedicate to the business. 

As the company grew, we had a handful of employees coming to our house to work in the basement office. And as the business grew and we introduced more products, the inventory got bigger and bigger. And then we launched a second brand, a photographic line called Modern Lore, and then we were out of space again. 

We needed a real office and warehouse space and decided to offset the cost of rent by finding a space that allowed for a retail shop in the front. So in 2013, we moved the office out of our house and opened a gift shop called Greater Goods in the Eat Street neighborhood of Minneapolis. Having a store was a great experience and we loved interacting with the local community instead of just shipping orders out. 

Over the next few years, Modern Lore ended up outselling Old Tom Foolery, thanks to Anthropologie consistently carrying the line and becoming our biggest account. Before we knew it, we had hundreds of SKUs for Modern Lore, hundreds of SKUs for Old Tom Foolery, hundreds of SKUs for Greater Goods, and then…we had a kid. (Record scratch.) It all started to feel very complicated and a lot to manage. And with a kid around, it became a lot harder to cover random store shifts if someone called in sick. It had been 11 years of a crazy, mostly wonderful ride, and we started to wonder, could we sell this thing and move on?

At the end of 2018, we sold our stationery brands, Old Tom Foolery and Modern Lore, to our very talented friends at The Mincing Mockingbird. You can still purchase many of our styles through them, and they’ve even expanded some of the collections a bit. 

We also sold the store to a local artist who was looking to leave a corporate job.

We didn’t cash out big time on those sales like a tech company might, but it was a nice way to wrap up that chapter of our life and not carry forward any debt or expenses. 

Joel had been freelancing for Apple on product launches off and on for several years alongside running our business. So after everything changed hands at the end of 2018, we spent the winter in California while he did a freelance gig at Apple and thought about what would be next.