I discovered the talented sisters – Janet & Trisha – behind PAWLING | print studio when they left me a comment on my blog. I immediately fell in love with their work. So, if you’re lurking back there, say hello. You may end up on my blog too. With that, allow me to introduce you to their delightful work.
Welcome. Give us some background about yourself and your business.
PAWLING | print studio is a collaboration between sisters Janet & Trisha. We make modern handmade prints and patterns for the home. We opened up shop in the fall shortly after graduating – Janet with an undergraduate degree in Graphic Design and Trisha with a Masters in Architecture. Despite spending very little time together in the past eight years because of school and jobs in different states, our interests seem to have independently converged and now we’re in business together! We named ourselves PAWLING | print studio in honor of our grandfather who recently passed away. He was a photographer and a painter at heart and always took time to teach us how to draw and paint when we were younger. We assume he is where our “artistic” genes came from, though our mom also has some pretty sweet calligraphy skills and our dad designed the house we lived in as kids.
The decision to take the self-employment route is not always an easy one. What gave you the confidence to take that leap?
In retrospect graduating in a down economy gave us the opportunity to try what we really wanted to do rather than what we were expected to do. Of course that doesn’t mean we knew it at the time. As far too many people know, searching and applying for employment is a full time job in itself, so although we weren’t giving up a job in the traditional sense, the decision to start PAWLING as a full-time venture was no small leap of faith. We had both been secretly toying with the idea while in school, but were too afraid to tell anyone. Once we sheepishly started talking about it with each other, we found we couldn’t stop. We were so full of ideas and excitement that we knew we had to take the idea seriously. Now whenever either of us is having doubts the other one is there with a pep talk. It certainly helps that we’re in it together!
Self employment can mean long hours, irregular income and other unpredictable stresses. How you do you handle it?
Hmm, sounds just like school. I don’t think we know any other way to live! But instead of hypothetical projects that will undoubtedly get torn apart in a review, we get to make things that we believe in and that people will actually use. Working for ourselves is infinitely more rewarding! We’ve had some amazing customers who with one comment manage to make all of the stress and uncertainty worth it. We’ve also been blown away by how supportive the online creative community is. We probably couldn’t do it without them and we definitely couldn’t do it without the support of our family.
What’s a typical day like for you? How did you keep yourself organized to avoid procrastination and other distractions?
A typical day is following our check list, but no two days are the same. Production days are definitely the easiest in terms of procrastination, because there are clearly defined objectives. Brainstorming days are the most fun, though there are so many aspects to setting up a business from research and design to production and marketing that often we are overwhelmed with ideas. For us, procrastination never seems to come from a lack of ideas, but rather from too many and a need to focus. Making lists really helps us prioritize our goals on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Fortunately we both like to use organization as a means of procrastination – sometimes we just can’t work until everything is in order!
Do your work from home? Or offsite?
We work from two homes! We dream of an offsite studio one day, but for now we just have designated “studio areas.”
It can get lonely working for yourself. Do you find yourself missing the companionship of a bustling office? How do you make sure you get social interaction throughout the day/week?
We’re lucky that we don’t work alone! Yes, it’s just the two of us, but that’s the way we like it! And we find that instead of just wanting some space to ourselves on weekends, we actually look forward to spending time with our friends.
Finding a work/life balance can be difficult with any job, perhaps more so with self-employment. Do you think you’ve found that balance?
Perhaps not yet, PAWLING is still very young and changing rapidly. We try our best to separate our evenings and weekends from work, but we’re definitely still learning.
What valuable lessons did you learn within your first year. Let’s start with the worst.
That’s an easy one, to start out within your means is great advice, but cutting corners is not. For example, scoop-coaters are absolutely positively necessary for screenprinting. We learned that the hard way.
And now the best.
It’s taken some time for us to get comfortable talking about our business to others. While we always had confidence in our products, we really weren’t sure we could pull off the business side of things. It was especially hard to explain PAWLING to our friends and family in the beginning before we had real products and a website. Now that we have tangible things to point to, it’s much easier for people to understand what we do. Now instead of getting skeptical reactions from people, they are generally impressed and enthusiastic about our work. Not only that, but a surprising number of people have since revealed that they secretly want to be more creative and that we’ve inspired them to be more proactive about their hobbies as well
Lastly, what advice would you give to others that are thinking about quitting their 9-5 job to pursue self-employment?
Not sure that we should be giving advice to anyone yet (see question 2!) but it felt right for us and so far the ups have outweighed the downs!!!
