It had always been my childhood dream to live in an English village. After years of hard work, I'm now surrounded by rolling fields and country lanes. So much natural beauty inspired me to paint again.
As a lifelong stationery geek, turning some of my paintings into stationery seemed a perfect match. So many friends asked for the notebook designs as presents that I thought perhaps other people would like them too; Eleanor Havers the brand was born.
Quite quickly I discovered that setting up any business puts your values to the test. If you're taking the time to read this, you're probably someone who cares, so let me tell you about what I care about and how this impacts our brand choices.
Our priorities are beauty, quality & conservation.
Each cover design is inspired by the beauty of the natural world so it makes sense that conserving that world is important to us. But we're also stationery geeks who like the look of cream pages with gently curved corners. Honestly, these are the pages we wanted to bring you. We sought high and low throughout the UK to find a way of manufacturing our beautiful designs with our dream pages inside.
The only way we could achieve this was to bulk manufacture orders of over a thousand notebooks for each design. You might not know this, but tons of unsold stationery is recycled every year and we didn't want to add to this problem. It is cheaper to create tons of this waste than it is to only make the customer orders placed as they come in. The waste is recycled but the fibres can only be recycled a few times. There's also a huge amount of energy wasted in this process.
Another option was to get our cream pages with curved corners produced outside the UK, but that would hugely increase our carbon footprint. Our choice was simple: what mattered more our lovely pages or the planet?
Obviously, we opted for making our stationery in a way that prioritises conserving the beauty of nature. So it's the highest quality white pages with square corners for now. We hope that one day our beautiful designs will have cream pages with curved corners inside but we won't damage the beauty of our planet to achieve that.
Our stationery matches our values: beauty, quality and conservation.
