On April 22, 2019, I started the Love Your Mother Collection with 2 stickers (Preserve & Protect and Wander & Wonder). The idea was to give back what I could with what I had. So I took my art and my love of stickers and mashed it together with my love of nature and trees and desire for there to be more trees in a world that desperately needs them.
I’m a firm believer that the way that best we affect change is by doing what we can with what we have whenever we are able.
In a little over 8 months, 2 stickers became 15 and my hope to plant a few trees with the help of my Cayligraphy community grew into 354 trees planted.
That’s incredible and I am blown away at what y’all have done with my small dream.
But I am so encouraged by this tree-planting power that I want to do more--and I think we can.
I told y’all that I had a crazy number in mind for 2020 and I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to tell you about the teased changes coming to the Love Your Mother collection.
It’s no longer a collection and is now a program. From now on, every 2 stickers—any 2 stickers— will plant a tree. With the help of some incredible friends, I realized recently that the Love Your Mother idea doesn’t have to be tied solely to “nature related stickers” because that’s the whole ethos of my entire business and whether there are leaves involved in a sticker design or not, I think it can be used to care for Mother Earth.
The second teased change is that I will be selecting a group of stickers to be my core collection that are always in stock and everywhere Cayligraphy stickers are sold. The stickers that don’t make it into that core collection will either be retired or be distributed into Store-Specific Packs that will be exclusive to each carrier of Cayligraphy.
The reasoning behind this is simple, but of great import. I, as an artist and the human behind Cayligraphy, want to create community and connections and strength through all the incredible shops I am housed in. I don’t want you to have to choose to go to one or the other, but for you to get to visit all the stellar shops that make up the Cayligraphy network. I want to support shopping local across the board and lift up every store I so dearly love and am proud to be a part.
(Keep an eye out for the reorganization of these stickers, and the revelation of new stickers, in the coming months.)
I think that was all I had to tell y’all—oh wait, that ONE BIG THING that I’ve been teasing about and I’m so excited to share with you.
Goals excite me. When I make goals, I make realistic and attainable goals and then I make big reach goals. Ones that I label “I got those big dreams, too” to keep me dreaming and innovating.
When I shared my tree planting goal for 2020 with a friend of mine, she met my hopes for big things and challenged me to go even bigger. So I did. We planted 354 trees in 2019. But since the start of this idea, I have landed in 3 stores (like WHAT), partnered with Kentucky State Parks Foundation (amazing), and expanded my sticker designs fivefold.
In 2020, with your help, I plan to plant 3,000 trees through my Love Your Mother program.
To keep things fun and keep y’all updated, I’ve added a counter on my home page and I plan for each store to have a running total of what that community has planted.
My dear friend and sustainability hero, Aubrey Helmuth-Miller of Redbudsuds®, says that small drops make oceans and I’m co-opting that for this: small stickers plant forests.