happy anniversary to us!

This week Heidi & I are celebrating a big anniversary…Rock Scissor Paper is 17 years old! Wow, where did the time go? Over the next week or so, We’ll be sharing some fun pictures from the beginnings of our business and some of our first products. Eeek! It’s kind of hard to look at some of these! But I have to remember that we were just starting out, and we had no idea what the vision of our company was or what it would become. We started with lots of handmade collage cards, hand-bound albums and notepads.

Basically for the first 5-6 years of our business, we did not create any of our own illustrations. Though we did draw, we didn’t feel confident enough to incorporate our own artwork into the designs of our products. We relied heavily on copyright free images from clipart books like those by Dover. While we love these types of illustrations, it became very apparent that in order for us to have an identity as a company and to have a recognizable brand, we needed to use original artwork. We were also really limited in what we could do with these existing images.

What really helped in making this change was the arrival of our very first computer, a Macintosh Performa from Sears (with a 180MB hard drive and 2 MB of ram!!!!). Our step-mom, Debi, got it for us as a gift to help with our fledgling business. We had little idea how to use it, but we plugged away at figuring it out each day. By the time we retired our baby, years later, we had learned how to use every single inch of it. A big difference from today, where most people have a computer that they (seriously) could make and edit a movie on, but only use 2% of it!

Tomorrow, we’ll show you some pictures from our very first street fair in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. We were only a few months old as a company and this was our first face-to-face with the shopping public. The highlight of the day was when a relatively unknown, teenage Leonardo DiCaprio (fresh off This Boy’s Life / Gilbert Grape films) came to shop our booth on his Rollerblades!

-Susie