For many years now we've been telling the blue skies & daisies story to anyone that asks for it. We LOVE telling it because it's OUR story and we play really big parts in it. How Albertine and I met and how we started this company is actually a very interesting story. It all began in 2002 when I (Brina) moved to Vancouver with my friend Nate McAnally...
The move to Vancouver from Victoria was a fairly spontaneous decision for me. The original plan was to move back to Toronto, but that would mean I'd be back in Ontario, where I was born, and I wasn't ready for that. Vancouver was a fresh start for me and my friend Nate. Nate was attending Emily Carr and I was looking for something new and exciting. New and exciting to me ended up being hanging out in the city and doing freelance work until my savings ran out and I would be forced to find a job. The forced to find a job part didn't happen because I ended up meeting this funny girl named Albertine.
Let's go back a bit further.
My friend from highschool, Louvens Remy, moved to Vancouver from Australia in early 2002. His sister (also a friend) stayed with him (sorta) for a month, before her trip to Japan, in late 2002. Louvens was living in a tiny 1 bedroom Vancouver apartment with his friend James. There was no room at the Inn. Layla, the outgoing forward person that she is, introduced herself to Lou's neighbour Albertine. Albertine gave Layla a roof to sleep under, some breathing room and a set of keys. Layla was having such a good time with Teenie she soon after introduced her to me. In my head I was like "Teenie is such a weird name. That's the kind of name you give to a not so brilliant, weightlifting obsessed Archie comic book character."
Albertine was not the Teenie I had in my head. In fact, Teenie ended up being a really smart, cheese loving, real life new best friend. After Layla flew away on her own adventure, Teenie and I continued to get together to played Yahtzee, drink coffee and brew up fun projects we could do together. Not much has changed since then.
OH that's not true.
For Christmas '02, Albertine and I decided to make all our friends trading cards. I did the designing and Teenie distributed the questionnaires and organized all the information. If we were in a movie, this scene would be the foreshadow. The scene looks something like this: us in a small room, hunched over our computers, giggling at eachother and in between our all-for-fun yelling matches we would high five eachother.
That sounds about right.
Bring. Bring. (the phone rings)
It's Teenie's sister Clarisse. She's getting married!! Albertine, well aware of my availability and design talents, offers our services to create wedding invitations for her. Strangely enough, she already had wedding invitations. What was needed was a wedding website. A wedding website? What's a freaking wedding website?!
Exactly!
So we did a little R&D and found out what it was. It's genius really. As a team, we built her sister the coolest wedding website we could think of. There were a lot of guests coming from out of town so it included all sorts of travel and accommodation information, rsvp capabilities and registry information. As this was happening, Teenie was laid off from her corporate IT job (which wasn't making her very happy anyway) and after a day of crying, we thought it would be fun to start our own company.
Our first idea was to start a magazine. The magazine idea was axed quickly as we saw how much work and money it would take. The next idea was to sell trading cards. Trading cards was the best idea in our minds. We thoroughly enjoyed the cards we made for our friends and family and witnessed their excitement and approval as well...but this dream was put on hold when our friend Scott Eastlick said to us "Why don't you sell wedding websites?"
So in the end, we owe everything to Scott. The end.
NO! That's not it!! There's more.
Soon after Scott's fateful words penetrated our brains, we sat down in Teenie's kitchen nook with a couple pads of paper and brainstormed about what to call ourselves and what our plan of attack was. During this brainstorm session we came up with our name, website address and I ran home and designed our logo. Most productive night ever!
Basically, the next day I moved into Teenie's 1 bedroom apartment and we started Blue Skies & Daisies Weddings Inc. Blue Skies & Daisies started off as a wedding website business but the idea was too fresh and new. We decided to include wedding invitations and other wedding stationery. After checking out what other wedding invitations look like, we knew we were in the right business. What we noticed was a lack of non traditional wedding options. Where were couples going for invitations sans lace, ribbon or frill?!
When we were younger we never had dreams of starting our own business or working in the wedding industry. Funny how life happens.
So that's our story. Hope you enjoyed it. Maybe one day we'll tell the after we started our company story. It's just as good.
