Last year I was listening to the Weirdos Book Club Podcast hosted by Sarah Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd when Pascoe mentioned she had received some correspondence from acclaimed writer Dolly Alderton on personalized stationary. “I got this delicious note card [that said] From the Desk of Dolly Alderton,” Pascoe recalls. Lloyd chimes in, “She’s got one of those note cards... I always want to buy one but then I think, who am I sending them to?” To which Pascoe shares that after receiving Alderton’s personalized stationary, she took the jump and decided to get her own, as well.

It’s only a short and relatively incidental part of their conversation but it jogged a very particular memory for me; I have always loved all things stationary, I grew up in the generation of password journals and pink fuzzy lock and key diaries and I remember clearly the first time I saw personalized stationary. I was flipping through the holiday catalogue for a high-end department store when I saw, in the lifestyle section, personalized calling cards–somewhere between a professional business card and the sexy allure of Elle Woods’ scented resume, they were a light pink, printed on a high gloss stock with a space for just your name and your phone number. Still in my clumsy adolescence, those wallet sized cards seemed like the ticket to elegance and to adulthood.

When I grew up and finally had cause to have business cards made though, I found myself hesitant; like Lloyd, I wondered what I would actually do with them in an increasingly digital world. And on a deeper level, I worried that I wasn’t important or professional enough to have them made. But when I heard the conversation around personalized stationary, I realized two things: one, I wasn’t alone in feeling unqualified to have my own stationery made and two: to ignore the voice in my head telling me that.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Stationery)

“I have a very early memory of loving the scent of paper, and realizing that paper smells different in different countries,” says Mariam Naficy the founder of Minted. “When was very young, my mother tried to teach me Chinese by giving me children’s books printed on thin, almost translucent paper with a really pleasant, sweet scent. So yes, my mother was probably the first woman who connected me to paper.”

It’s a sentiment shared by so many women in my own life, and others in the industry–Anna Bond, the founder of Rifle Paper Co. tells me she was also a young girl when she fell in love with stationery, also through a matrilineal line. “My grandmother would send me postcards from her travels and I had a couple pen pals in elementary school, including a close friend who moved to Japan and would send me letters on the most amazing Japanese stationery,” she tells me. “I also loved cards and stationery by Mary Engelbreit (and still do).”

Those early imprints of the world of cards and letter writing and stamps and luxurious pens are often intertwined with sentiments of care and etiquette practices; growing up before the widespread use of the internet and computers meant documenting your day to day with ritual precision and watching the adults in your life correspond through the mail. Holly Chapman, Head of Brand of Papier, says she still remembers her first diary; she kept the key to its lock in her bedside table and was only eight or nine when she remembers using it. “My mum was big on thank you notes too, that was non-negotiable. So stationery was just part of the fabric of how I was raised,” she says.

Something as simple as cards and paper diaries also transcend so many of our childhood memories because unlike technology, paper stationery is widely affordable; you need an expensive phone or laptop to send an email, but a card and a pen can be purchased for just a few bucks. “We didn't have a lot of money but we had a really creative house — scrapbooking, making little books, writing scripts my sister and I would act out,” says Chapman.

An Analog Connection

Naficy has a soft spot in her heart for handwritten notes; she tells me she and her husband dated long-distance before email existed and it was letter writing that kept them connected. “We are probably one of the last cuples on earth who actually have kept piles of love letters,” she says. To this day, she keeps any handwritten notes she receives including one J.J. Abrams–“He put so much effort into the aesthetics of the note, and his hand lettering is really impressive,” she adds. In increasingly digital world, it can be easy to feel like letter writing is a lost art but experts I spoke to all share the same sentiment: the less analog our lives become, the more we crave it.

“We communicate in more ways than ever now but somehow it feels less meaningful,” says Chapman. “Substack, group chats, Slack, email—it's a lot of noise. And I think people are starting to feel that. There's a real behavioral shift toward wanting to slow down, be more intentional, spend less time on their phones. Writing—even something as small as a note—offers a kind of presence that digital just doesn't.”

Bond agrees, and adds that the very act of letter writing demands a pace totally different from the day to day we’ve become accustomed to. “I know anytime I have to write a card, it forces me to really slow down,” she says. Everything from drafting what you’ll say to picking the addressing an envelope also requires a level of care that can be felt by the recipient in a way that both extracts us from the digital world and conveys a level of heart to the recipient that a text or email simply cannot convey.

Beyond all that–it’s undeniable that stationery, especially personalized stationery has a chicness to it impossible to mimic with an e-vite; that same lure I felt as a young girl is very much palpable when I send notes or recieve them. “My first job in London was at a PR agency,” says Chapman.” And the women who ran it were just so put together and somehow that extended to everything, including how they wrote things down and the cards they sent.”

It’s Personal

Now, you certainly don’t need personalized stationery to have fun with this analog activity; and letter writing need not be your stationery activity of choice. I personally would be completely lost without my Hobonichi A5 which houses every ‘To Do’ list I need, all my lists, and a hearty sticker collection; I keep my appointments in a Louis Vuitton planner filled with Filofax paper and I don’t go anywhere without it. I’m a Le Pen devotee–the fine tip marker style pens available in every color imaginable prove the perfect writing instrument and a chic desk accessory and you will never find me without a Rifle Paper Co. notepad to jot down my of-the-moment thoughts; I take every Zoom call with a spiral bound Papier notebook at hand.

Online retailers like JetPens and Stationery Pal offer the best of both analog and digital worlds allowing consumers worldwide to access the absolute bliss of Japanese stationery shopping with it’s ultra cute erasers, pens, and notebooks, not to be outdone by the hyper tactical office tools on offer.

That being said, if you’ve ever found yourself wanting to pull the impossibly cool move of giving a meet-cute your business card or pull the power move of sending a letter to a co-worker on stationery that reads “From the Desk Of,” I’d urge you to take Pascoe and Lloyd’s advice and just go for it even if you don’t feel official enough yet to warrant it. “I think so much of life is about doing things before you feel ready–before you feel like you've earned it,” says Chambers. “And there's something about seeing your name on something that's quietly clarifying. Like, oh, I'm a person who does this now. You don't need to wait. That's it.”