The Upside of Being Down by Jen Gotch

Author:Jen Gotch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8 I Am Very Busy

For the first couple of years after selling ban.do, we continued to focus on hair accessories but started to dip our toes into some new categories too. And for a small group of creatives with no experience, we did a great job. Eventually, Lifeguard Press encouraged us to do a back-to-school line and said we should include a planner. You mean, like one of those paper agendas? I thought. Do people still use those? Don’t they know about Google Cal and smartphones? Turns out everyone knew about technology and still preferred planners. In fact, those who love planners, really really love planners. I couldn’t believe it was a thing, but as a lover of paper myself, I was excited to bring something new to the planner market. Ali, our new graphic designer at the time (she’s creative director now—good job, Ali), and I spent a ton of time studying the planners currently on the market because I was dead-set on doing something different. Ali was and is always game to roll up her sleeves and figure it out. She quickly became an incredibly important part of our team, and, well, I love her a lot and wish I could claim her as my own, but HR told me that was inappropriate. So anyway, we wanted our planner to feel really personal, like a friend rather than a simple, energy-less book. In order to make that happen, we added in handwritten compliments, insisted on pages of hand-drawn stickers, and used our limited illustration skills along with artwork created by some good friends. We ended up using some of that original art for month openers that were each very different but all bright and colorful, with phrases that encouraged optimism or at least a good laugh. This endeavor would be the birth of our artist collaborations, which have been a major part of our business ever since.

We knew the covers of these planners would be really important, so we spent a ton of time searching for inspiration, doodling pattern ideas on white printer paper, and thinking of phrases that would resonate, although back then we probably called them “fun phrases”—while the concept of emotional resonance was in us, we hadn’t totally articulated it yet. I had recently seen a picture of a girl lying on a beach towel (I think it was a beach towel, maybe it was a blanket) that had “BUSY” written on it. I remember being intrigued by the contradiction of her mood and the word. It occurred to me that maybe we should put the phrase “I Am Very Busy” on one of our planners. I liked the humor of it—declaring how busy you are is amusingly self-important—but I also figured if you were buying a planner you must actually feel like you’re busy. And you probably are busy. Very busy, in fact. Well, that phrase was well-received, to put it mildly, and was our top-selling planner cover for many years. Today, using language that evokes emotional resonance has become a cornerstone of our business.

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