Behind the Scenes: Designing our first custom tissue paper

If you've been following along on my socials, you might have already seen an update about our custom tissue paper, made with an illustrator, just for Paper Bento.

My inspiration started with children's books. I read a lot of them these days with my toddler, and going back through some of my own favorites from childhood, I started to really notice the artwork on the inner cover pages, maybe for the first time. Open one up and before you even get to the story, there's usually a page like that: one color, a pattern or a small illustration, easy to miss if you're moving fast.

Nobody buys a book for the inner cover, but I love that page. You get a small taste of the artwork before the story even starts, almost like a flavor of what's coming. I've caught myself wishing some of those illustrations came as their own wrapping paper, just so I could hold onto that feeling a little longer.

A mutual friend connected me to Eve. She's a designer by day, works in tech, and takes on projects like this on the side because she loves the work itself. We got on a call to meet for the first time, and I remember feeling, almost right away, that I could trust her with this. She was warm, she was open, and she was so clearly professional about the whole thing. Some collaborations you have to talk yourself into. This one just felt right from the start.

A few weeks later, we had a check-in call. I assumed she'd pull up some sketches and walk me through them. Instead, she started by showing me her process. She'd gone through my Instagram and read through the whole website, every word of it, before she'd drawn a single line. Then she told me what she'd taken from all of it: that the warmth and the storytelling are what people actually connect to here, and that she wanted the illustration to carry that forward, not just to look nice in a box.

I didn't expect to feel so touched by that. When you're building something on your own, you get used to being the only one who fully sees it. To have someone outside of Paper Bento look this closely, and land on the exact thing I care about most, felt like being understood in a way I wasn't prepared for.

It's not so different from what I try to do with every item that goes into a box. I don't pick something because it photographs well or because it's trending. I want to know who made it, why they made it that way, and what it actually feels like to use. Watching Eve dig into my own brand with that same kind of care, without anyone asking her to, made me realize how much it shows when someone actually takes the time to look.

The tissue paper is ready now, and the plan is to to start using it this month. When it wraps around your stationery goodies, I want you to know there's more behind it than just a nice pattern. There's someone who took the time to actually understand what this brand is before she ever picked up a pencil.

That's the part I'm most excited to share with you.

Thanks for reading.

I hope this gave you a small sense of how much care can go into the details you don't always see.

Is there a time someone understood something about you or your work before you had to explain it? Hit reply and tell me.

Paper Bento