It's the day after Christmas, and I am working my tail off in the print shop. I am preparing prints from December 14th-18th for my assistant who returns tomorrow from her much deserved holiday break. As I sit here making updates to our website, I am reflecting on how much our little shop that started in the front room of my home has grown and changed!
When I began this journey, it started as a dream. It was Summer of 2020, and we had a little baby, the Covid pandemic was raging on impacting thousands of families, including ours. I had just spent a month in recovery after falling ill with sepsis and spending a week in isolation at a hospital. Because of that near death experience, we had decided as a family that homeschool was our future, for one year only. After that year, we would transition the kids back into public school, and life would go back to normal.
But no, after beginning our homeschool journey, I saw a need in our homeschool community for affordable, high quality printing and binding, and I set my sights on creating such a business. Never having owned a business before (never more than a side hustle at least), I had NO idea what I was getting myself into.
I launched our website on January 1st, 2021. In 2025, we will celebrate our fourth year in business, and WOW, it is crazy to look back on our humble beginnings with a tiny printer and a dream, and here we are now in a converted garage print shop with two BIG printers and adding a third this year! We have practically grown out of our current space, and I have had multiple part time assistants over the years to help support our shop and our community.
I hope to get back to blogging this year; although it seems like a dying art, but just getting my thoughts down on "paper" might just be what I need on those days when motivation is lagging, when I'm exhausted from nights with no sleep, when I'm overwhelmed with print orders, and a printer is down or we are without toner AGAIN because lately, this has been my greatest stress, lol.
Thank you all for supporting our family business; it means the world to me, and I hope that you will follow along this "blog" journey as I try to connect with all of you with words and photos, when I remember to add them.
For now, enjoy a family photo from this Christmas (sans parents because mom is never in photos), and I hope to have more words to share with you later.
With Love,
Gabrielle and the Watson Crew
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