Good morning, crafty friends! Did you have a good weekend? I sure wish we could have a few warmer days mixed in with all this wet and cold and snow…. still more snow. Is ‘ugh’ an emotion? Because that’s how I’m feeling about the snow! Despite the weather, we had a great weekend celebrating Jon’s 40th Birthday and it looks like many of you also enjoyed our celebration by using your 40% coupon at the TE webstore over the weekend. Our amazing team is working hard to get all of your orders shipped out quickly!

Speaking of our team, could I brag about them for just a minute? As you know (or maybe not?), Taylored Expressions is a small company started by me in a tiny garage in California which then moved to our basement in Iowa and now occupies two office/warehouse suites. However, it’s not the product that makes our warehouse special, it’s the people who fill this space every day. We are so blessed to have such a hard-working, joyful bunch of people who genuinely seek to ‘share joy’ through their daily task lists. Each of our staff members plays such an important role and I think it’s high time that you meet each of them!

I’ll be featuring a different member of our staff every other month here on the TE Blog. I’ll share a little bit about their job at TE, their life outside of TE, and their crafty journey (or lack thereof for some of them!). I’ve asked each of our staff members to select a specific product or occasion for which they’d like some crafty ideas, and then I’ve tasked our fabulous design team to inspire their next project! In January, I introduced you to Meredith, our shipping manager, and shared design team projects created to inspire her next project… birthday invitations for her soon-to-be 8-year-old triplets! In case you missed it, you can read more about Meredith here!

Today I’d like you to meet Leslie! We don’t have fancy titles here, but if I had to give her job a title, I’d call it Director of Customer Experience as she’s responsible for the experience of all of our unique customer groups. She plans our marketing calendar and facilitates experiences through merchandising the Studio for our local audience, managing the online experience from initial product searches to checkout, and overseeing relationships with our retail store accounts. I asked Leslie what she likes best about working at TE, and here’s what she had to say:

Outside of Taylored Expressions, Leslie is a mom to three girls, the oldest of which is graduating from high school this spring. I’m sure many of you can relate to the emotions that come with that! In preparation for the onslaught of grad parties, Leslie asked for some ideas for graduation cards and gifts. And because I love a special mother/daughter moment, below is Leslie pictured with her daughter Laina.

Today we’ll be focusing the inspiration on cards for the graduate! It’s often nice to personalize graduation cards with the school colors, school name, and year of graduation as Jen Shults did on the card below. Jen personalized this card appropriately so that Leslie should have no trouble making up a batch of these for Laina’s friends graduating from Ankeny High School Class of 2018 (maroon & gold!).

Noriko’s stunning card could also easily be personalized with the school colors of the graduate. Her unique use of the Graphic Greetings – Grad stamp for the background makes me want to pull out all of my other Graphic Greetings stamps and see what similar ideas I could come up with! After embossing the Graphic Greetings in the background she used the Eventful – Grad border to die cut and pop up the graduates back among the stamped words. Both Noriko and Jen used our Congrats script which is perfect for celebrating many different occasions, especially graduation.

I realize this was one of my “wordier” blog posts, so if you made it here to the end, kudos to you! I hope you’ll stop back tomorrow as we’ll explore gift card holders for the graduate! Have a great day and Happy Stamping!