ILOOTPAPERIE

Our foray into the stationery world began if you can believe it! with creating custom wedding invitations for some of our close friends. We found quickly that the part of the process that delighted us most was designing the accompanying thank you cards we included with the invitations as part of our gift to the couple. This epiphany shaped the beginnings of ILOOTPAPERIE when we launched in December 2010 as a tiny spark of a passion project with just six designs on Etsy, which we both continued to work on during our free time outside of our day jobs. This all took place before the advent of the phenomenal of the side hustle, so we simply thought of it as taking steps to get an idea Doris and I had daydreamed about off the ground in case she moved to London for a position she had been applying for at her day job in the finance industry.

We loved that our father looked up our last name “Lieu” in the dictionary to determine the spelling when he emigrated over as a graduate student (he was and still is very nerdy). So we have aspired to weave our family name, Lieu, into a company name. We initially started with “In Lieu of Ordinary Things." Then as we played around with variations, we realized the acronym spelled “ILOOT”.. next we added “paperie” to it and voila! Pierre, our French stripe–wearing bandit mascot, sprang to life. He steals hearts via our cheeky stationery goods.

We've always said in designing, we are inspired by everything and anything, and this still very much rings true for us. We thoroughly enjoy wordplay and a good pun, or even better two. And we like to think because Alice was born on Labor Day and Doris was born near the Thanksgiving holiday, we were born to pun! Growing up as Chinese Americans (ABCs!) and with the Mandarin language spoken in the family (our grandparents are from Taiwan and mainland China), we came to the realization recently as Alice relied heavily on listening to Cdramas to stay awake illustrating for long stretches while completing our sister's book during the pandemic: there has always been wordplay all around us. We've grown up with ingrained traditional Chinese beliefs, for example - that certain numbers, i.e. 8 "ba," are considered to be lucky and the reason behind this was that when spoken, the characters sound phonetically like a lucky word or phrase, "fa" in this case which is the pronunciation of the character that means to generate wealth.

This homophonous play on words is absolutely at the root of our fondness for punning. And if we can manage to double pun in a design, then we achieve what we affectionately call Doris' scrabble effect, where she decimates her opponents with a well-placed short word utilizing both high-scoring tiles and placement to complete two words in one move. All this is very much reflected in our designs as we are always tickled when we are able to combine our love of wordplay with Alice's illustrations of subject matters we have a soft spot for: from our love of snail mail and stationery, to food (our much-beloved Love You From My Head To-Ma-Toes Mother's Day card), to funny animals (our Slow Clap Sloth Congrats), to pop culture (our Lovely Lady Puns collection celebrating powerful women), and to everything in between!

Brightness, nostalgia, and connection with a dash of cheekiness are reoccurring core themes in our work. Creating our collections has become a cathartic process and often captures a range of our own emotions in response to everything that has been happening in our immediate realities.

There are lots of earnest laughs and heartfelt emotions behind our concepts. Even the vetoed concepts tend to make at least one of us giggle while we try to sell it to the other person. We aim to have a good time with it and to never take any of it for granted and believe that that’s what makes our products memorable. That this shared laughter and connection extends beyond just the two of us is a gift. We are always delighted to find what speaks to us, speaks to others as well - this is a sense of connection that inspires us to keep showing up, the idea that something we created could bring a bit of cheer or comfort to fellow kindred spirits no matter the distance that separates us.