A shot of the kids, one of the final winter photos of the shop.
It’s been many months since I did weekly updates, mainly because we seem to be endlessly pedalling towards the end of the tunnel that is eternally just out of reach. Perhaps it was a good practice while I had it going, a chance to ruminate on what was going on. In any case, we’re back in an official lockdown, so I suppose the wheel of fortune continues to spin.
Life seems to be malfunctioning lately, and we’re all waiting for the reboot. A year into the pandemic and various states of lockdown and we’re still figuring things out. Seasons change and swell and warp and we’re just doing the best that we can.
At the tail end of winter, Naomi ate an icicle hanging off the back of the Subaru. She was so casual about it! Crunchy, she said. Caleb didn’t even, apparently, seem concerned about stopping her. They were both in the backyard, waiting for me, negligent parent, to get my things together and to lock the door, and Naomi literally put into her mouth and consumed a piece of ice hanging off a car, our car, in our backyard. And it’s moments like these that make me consider not only am I entirely unfit to be a parent, but what’s the point of even trying. But as the kids get older and more independent and come up with crazy ideas, I am grateful for these seats, to watch them argue and chase each other and share snacks and negotiate turn taking. Assigned to sweep they instead practice sword moves and I watch in admiration as one of them ducks behind a pillar with the sign reading watch your step!
We’re now well into spring, warm days and buds on plants and trees. Even the indoor plants seem to be sprouting, fuller, greener. We usually head into the shop on Sundays, when the team is all off, no one there to witness the general chaos.
It’s a bit demoralizing, still, even after these months, to walk into the shop after it’s been closed for so long. It’s relatively neat, but shelves have been raided of organized displays, and there’s dust building up in places that are normally well-trafficked. We re-opened for a brief period this summer and the team made a collectively monstrous effort to clean and move furniture around and get everything back on display and ready for browsing without touching. And then we closed again, and now here we are, things slowly deteriorating as we restock into the back warehouse to try and consolidate everything, tables taken over for sorting and counting tasks.
But, at the very least, in the quiet of the shop on a Sunday morning, we get a chance to notice the light, the plants calmly drinking it all in, to putter around in the drawers. The plants are indeed thriving, their leaves occasionally stirred by not wind but a child waving their broom around. Perhaps not thriving, given my uncoordinated attempts to prune and water regularly, but green with tiny leaves occasionally unfurling.
I’m sure it’s a metaphor for life, what happens when humans take a step back, and yet we miss you all.
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A million years ago, a pandemic struck, and I seemed to spend my time divided between subpar child supervision and frantically spinning my wheels, considering my small business’s doom.
Several months ago, as things settled into their groove of horrifying news that doesn’t seem to be able to get any worse, and the sticker shock has worn off, I began relishing one very thin silver lining: breaking out my sewing machine again. Early on in the pandemic, I made these quick and dirty masks that did the job, if grimly. At some point, quite late into all this, I decided that we were going to have a bit more fun with it, and I went deep into the rabbit hole of finding just the right fabrics. Did you know that there is fabric for basically everything in life? Peppa Pig, a truly endless number of cat-themed fabric, Darth Vader and rainbows. It’s astonishing. Jon has resigned himself to also now wearing on his face Peppa Pig and anthropomorphized seagulls and lemons.
It is extremely satisfying to stitch things together, pieces of fabric, snip snip, turning things inside out. To make something useful. I’ve been mailing them to people because the masks fit into letter mail and when you haven’t written to your pen pal in many months, it’s such a delightful way to apologize for your tardiness and overall inadequacies and show them that you care.
I’ve been listening to audiobooks while cutting fabric and stitching pieces of fabric together, and it’s been great. Fingers busy as I get lost into a story, almost as good as driving with audiobooks. I’ve already gotten through Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which I had been meaning to read for a while. It is a blast, a ton of fun, funny and dry, and I’m glad I procrastinated on it for several years in order to have had it to enjoy in this specific time. I’ve now started Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips which is not at all as I thought it was, i.e. a non-fiction environmental book, but instead is a thriller taking place on a remote Siberian peninsula. But you know what, this is a surprise that I will take.
In any case, it’s sometimes nice to take a break from things. It’s not really a break from life (making masks during a pandemic) but it is a break from screens, from things flashing and glowing, and sometimes it’s nice to do something with your hands, writing with a pen on paper, feeling cotton in your fingers, stirring something on the stove.
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Upon a dusty windowsill, a couple of plants continue to stay alive. What are the chances! So many strikes against them from the moment they crossed my threshold: pots too small, watered infrequently, low light, above a baseboard heater, at one point in time I believe I saw a creepy crawler in one of the pots which meant a period of several weeks of avoidance and non-watering, in an effort to smoke out that thing with unclear success.
But now, upon us, is daylight saving, and with it longer days, and all of that additional solar lumen energy flowing in through the filters of a frosted, north-facing, never yet been cleaned window may perhaps be just what these plants need.
It is Friday and pizza night here, the cat is stretched out on the deck, half-heartedly pawing at anyone walking near him, I picked up my library holds from a librarian who was gracious enough to not comment on my overdue books.
Currently reading: The Removed by Brandon Robson
Currently drinking: ginger turmeric tea
Latest achievement: vacuuming
Current household drama: Chicken and our neighbour’s cat variously hissing at each other and sunbathing together
Currently looking forward to: being able to have the windows open
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I took this picture of Spadina, from College looking down to Dundas, early on in the pandemic, maybe in April 2020. It was surreal to see the north end of Chinatown so empty in broad daylight.
It’s been about a year since the pandemic came into Toronto. The virus had already made its way to Canada months before, and there were concerns in different countries, different parts of the world, but around this time, just before March Break for schools here in Toronto, things started picking up precipitously. What’s the official date on which to celebrate this day? The day we closed the shop? The day the WHO declared a global pandemic? The day Tom Hanks got a positive test? Who knows. It’s around now, and given how precipitously time moves, I think maybe it’s best I not look into it too closely.
This is our new normal, and we’ve had months now to adjust to having our shop closed and wearing masks and being in lockdown and it’s no longer wild and apocalyptic: it’s normal for us to have to double check extra masks in backpacks or in the glove compartment, pulling them out of the laundry to hang dry. I’ve always had a hard time with change, letting go of things, moving on, even to greener pastures.
But it’s been a year, and we’ve made it through, and the end of the tunnel is finally approaching. In the news, there is talk and prediction of a third wave here in Ontario and Toronto, the race to vaccinate against new variants. Who knows what will still be left after this is all over, how the books will look for many small businesses, what the long term effects will be for the kids who have had an erratic year and who have had drilled into their heads over and over again not to touch anything or go near anyone or breathe too much. Each community—hair salons, school parent councils, restaurants—struggling in their own ways.
We are grateful to still be here, which is probably all there is to say in a year during which so many have faced real loss. Grateful for your orders, your snail mail, your encouraging comments, staff, being able to keep our staff, a library that has temporarily suspended its late fines, for sunny days. It has sure been a year, and after 12 months of this, there’s not much new to say, other than we’re thankful to be able to look ahead to the other side of this.
A more recent photo, looking southeast to the CN Tower from the Alexandra Park housing development.
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Happy Lunar New Year!
I hope you had a good one if you celebrate, or if you’re still celebrating. It’s as good a time as any to get some Chinese food, or perhaps try to wrangle some money out of your elders.
I was a little behind the game, which comes as no surprise to anyone. Though, if you’d like to feign surprise, I would gladly take it. A day late and a dollar short, I finally wrangled the kids into dressing up into some vaguely new year-ish outfits and then took a few photos of them.
There’s lots going on, shipments floating around the universe, the imminent future swimming in murky uncertainties. A missing TWSBI box originally destined for us has been located in Memphis, and we’re once again grateful for Philip at TWSBI who handles many things at once. Sailor inks have come in, and here I am, at night, listening to my audiobook, making ink samples, debating which inks I should fill up a pen with now that I have a bottle out and open. I finally worked it up to go into the library to pick up my holds, some of them on their final day: I have some overdue books that I’m still working on, and now that the library, only open for curbside pick up, has a librarian checking you out, and possibly investigating your overdue books and fines that pop up on the screen, I’ve been a bit dodgy. Outrageous UPS brokerage charges continue to plague my internal sense of justice, although I am mostly mollified by how friendly our UPS driver is.
Caleb is returning back to the throng of the classroom next week, and I feel a bit like I’m sending him out into the wilderness.
But we are grateful for our health and an ever-expanding definition of family, and the year ahead. We have big plans for both Valentine’s Day and Family Day: heading into the shop, futzing around, watering the plants, chastising the children for crashing into things, clearing out some of the junk in Jon’s office. All the loves of my life.
In celebration of Lunar New Year, we’ve made a $500 donation to the Canadian Council for Refugees.
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We got a label maker. The small delights of life these days, they know no bounds.
We actually got two, one for the studio shop/home (really for the home as the studio shop is basically toast, a dark, lifeless abyss that people sometimes call, mistaking it for the main shop, just a vacuous black hole of hope covered in a film of dust, recollecting its earlier days waiting for permits, life’s ironic circles mocking at all turns), and one for the main shop. The labels at the main shop and warehouse are, of course, less exciting because things are spelled correctly. (In fact, though, I am quite thrilled to be labeling things at the warehouse: “Kaweco spare parts”! “Mail”! “Fine”!)
Caleb has been having a lot of fun being about as helpful as you might expect.
In any case, here in Toronto it is occasionally grey and occasionally snowy and occasionally hints of sunlight come out and we all believe for just a moment that the future is going to be okay and then some child breaks something or spills something on a library book or some adult makes some passive aggressive comment about the heat and another adults makes some equally passive aggressive comment about how we all have to wear another sweater if we’re cold and then we march onward.
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We are homeschooling again, and looking to be doing so for another month. I am, by turns, grateful that we have the resources to support Caleb (technology, adult assistance, school supplies), and talking myself off the edge. I’ve been eating salty and crunchy things late into the night, while trying to lure the cat into my lap. I’ve been trying to talk Jon into getting a second cat. I read somewhere that once you get three cats, you’re officially neurotic, but I figure we still have some room.
Virtual school this time around is actually virtual school, as opposed to before, last March to June, where we didn’t see Caleb’s teacher for three months, and she instead put out a weekly list of links to YouTube videos and worksheets that I was in charge of doling out, and he was otherwise basically feral. Now he has a teacher doing zoom lessons, morning routines, giving the kids instructions on constructing booklets in which they write and describe parts of their community, small groups for guided reading, there’s music class and gym class and Caleb is doing jumping jacks and pushups and scaring the cat away. It’s all chaotic, but also really nice, that Caleb still has interaction with his teachers and peers, in this structured way. He has homework that has a lot of leeway, which is what we need. He’s got a notebook where he does his writing and math questions, where he glues in things that his teachers assign. Caleb is sort of a kid who zones out, and the largess of being able to hide his comic books and paper airplanes and doodling has left Caleb wide-eyed, looking down. I spend most of my time telling Caleb to focus.
Every few days we do a big clean up where I manically recycle everything, and stack up all of the comic books in an angry pile, and demand to know why I’m the only one sharpening pencils.
In any case, we are managing.
Caleb, paying attention.
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I am squeezing things tight, as I have a few other things that I would’ve ideally liked to have published before the year end, balls crashing down around me, but of course I could not let the year go without a staff appreciation post.
In the span of this pandemic, we have shut down and opened up and shut down again and all of the things in between have made for a challenging year. Staff have come and gone from our team, and we are missing some faces, but our team continues to be what keeps this whole thing humming and moving along. In this awful and endless year, our team has been here day in and day out, from making sure the normal things continue to happen—answering emails, shipping out orders, managing inventory, tidying things up—to all of the new, awful, unusual, difficult, and unpleasant things.
Monitoring customers' mask usage, affixing Spanish language one way circulación stickers on our floor because the English language ones were sold out, trying to convince people they have to take off their gloves from outside and sanitize their hands at our door instead of continuing to wear their gloves into our shop, dealing with understandable frustrations from our customers who have had delayed Canada Post shipments, dealing with understandable frustrations from customers who are wondering why we’ve had so many out of stock items, moving inventory back and forth from the shop to the warehouse and back again, moving buckets under leaks, moving fans to circulate the smoke coming into our warehouse from a neighbouring restaurant barbecuing inside with a broken vent (safety first!), listening to Caleb’s cello practice, cajoling Naomi into finding the inventory she has hidden somewhere in the shop that we now need, new rules, haha! Tricked you! Old rules actually, but now slightly tweaked, all of us waiting on Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau. With grace, and good humour, and patience, and getting through the year with us. This final slog through Christmas, with bins and bins of orders carefully packed up.
In the midst of what has been a difficult year for us both professionally and personally, we couldn’t be more grateful for these people we’re in the trenches with.
Alas we could not have a Christmas party, and so everyone, in their rotations and shifts, stood next to each other for photos. Our team in disparate parts, but united in one heart.
Our full time team (Amber, Josh, Jon, Brendan), along with someone we found off the street. Just kidding! Derrick, an old hand, has rejoined us recently, and we are grateful to have him. These people have been the ones you have spoken to on the phone, answered your questions on the website, packed up your orders, and have kept the ship going.
Our part team team, Dylan and Elaine, plus Brendan, our manager. Dylan has been missing from our website on our staff page for a while, but that is soon to be remedied. The extra support when we’ve needed it, and this year, have we ever needed it.
A photo I found of some vague celebration early on in the pandemic, possibly a birthday, although the timing is a bit loose.
Grateful for these people to celebrate with.
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We did not get a Christmas tree for the shop for the first time ever. It was both because trees were expensive this year, and also because it seemed a bit pathetic with no customers in the shop. It has been a hairy year.
I am working on a blog post to summarize the year, and it’s been harrowing to consider the year almost behind us. Soon to come.
But for now, we are wishing you a very merry Christmas. All the best that this season may bring, and for everything that’s ahead.
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Things have deteriorated here in Toronto, and we’ve been put into lockdown. It’s both unsurprising and demoralizing. I have self-diagnosed myself with seasonal affect disorder, which I’m still trying to convince Jon is a real thing, and with the cold, grey, snowy weather upon us, everything feels a bit grim. Chicken has been a bit emotional these days, with the snow, as he doesn’t like his paws getting wet, and therefore has been stuck inside with us, his family, the ones that feed him and pet him and love him.
On the one hand, we’ve been closed for a little while now to walk-in traffic and browsing. We’re a small team. As we saw the numbers, we had no choice but to circle the wagons, trying our best to blindly walk that line between safe and sorry, whoever knows where either of those are. On the other hand, the situation spiraling out of control here in the city is a bit too reminiscent of apocalyptic fiction. Here, our wagons, and here, us, torches alight, waving wildly at anyone daring to approach our doors, looking for some paper or ink. Yes, we will trade you this last bottle of Emerald of Chivor for some antibiotics and three potatoes.
I guess the scary thing for us, as a shop, and as a shop family, is that once a vaccine gets rolled out and is widely adopted and cases drop to something more manageable here in Toronto or in Canada, it’s certainly not as though most small businesses are going to make it “out of this” the same, bouncing right back to the same operational levels, the same staffing levels, the same shop hours. We’ve all robbed Peter to pay Paul and it turns out Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are waiting in the wings. Every small business we know has made small and large, drastic and severe cuts and changes, and every loan or injection or grant or “pause” on a hydro bill tides you over—maybe—but so many businesses that stagger out of this aren’t going to be the same, permanently crippled by decisions we made without knowing what the future would hold. Already, we’ve seen some shops close their brick and mortar, having to give up their lease and move fully to online, running it out of their homes, others just bowing out as gracefully as they can. We salute you from our own wobbling ship, bailing out water as we watch, taping up holes with gaff tape, at the very least, a step up from washi.
For us, we’ve had this opportunity to focus on our online, and to launch a new website, which, while hasn’t been without its own headaches, has been something we’ve been talking about doing for a while, and is a step we’re grateful to be able to take. With the temporary removal of the manpower needed to run our brick and mortar shops, we pivoted, as is the general wisdom for small businesses in this time. Restaurants can’t do dine-in? Pivot to take home menu meals! Retail shops can have customers come in anymore? Pivot to a flashy new website! We’re pivoting. Everyone is trying their best. The line dance is both horrific and fascinating.
We see business owners, chefs, artists, who are optimistic and putting their hearts and minds into it, driving hard into slicing their lemons into different shapes, and to a healthy extent, all small business owners have a bit of that in them, trying to problem solve when things come up, trying new events or new lines or new ways of doing things. But after half a year, a year of this, my own optimism has become a bit more unhinged. It’s all going to be alright! She cackles maniacally as she cowers in the corner with the cat, sucking on lemon wedges.
That’s all to say we’re all taking deep breaths as we barrel into the holiday season. Barreling is indeed the right word, I can sometimes hardly believe how fast we’re moving. How is it already late November? I’m certainly not trying to guilt anyone into shopping local or buying stationery that they don't need. We’ve all seen the posts on social media about supporting local businesses, and they mean a lot to us, because they mean that people are recognizing what main street shops can bring to their communities, and seeing the losses to their neighbourhoods and cities as the dust moves and settles. But I know that it can also be exhausting, to feel pressured to buy things in a certain way or to feel guilty about buying other things in other ways. The truth of the matter is really and truly that we want to offer value and a glimpse into what it means to run a family shop and supplies and tools that you feel you do need, and that do help you to focus, be creative, connect or disconnect in the right ways, put words or art on the page. To enjoy writing. I sometimes joke that the frivolity of these obsolete tools we call pens is part of the fun! And it is, but in many ways, stationery and writing by hand is something that does connect us to ourselves and to others. I mean, I wouldn’t stop you from buying something just to keep us alive (what can I offer you? Stickers? Pencils? Some paper clips?) but really and truly, if no one is writing anymore, then we’re going to go out of business pandemic or not.
And so we march on. This holiday season is going to look different, much like everything else has over this last year: family, school, going to the library. We are grateful for all of you in our corner and in our community. We’re eating lots of unhealthy take out because it’s now, circuitously, good for the great communal Us and not at all feeding my feelings. It’s been awful and I’m sure there is worse to come, but we march on because there’s no other choice, and also because we’re holding out this insane hope that this too shall pass and we’re going to be there on the other side of it.
For a few of you, the website is still not working (although I hope by now it is). The new blog is on the new website so you’ll only really be reading this if it is working for you. Supposedly it takes a few hours or a day or two depending on where you live for things to update on the internet, especially if you live in a rural area. The developer gave Jon an explanation with a lot of technological terms, and Jon gave me a watered down version of it, of which I absorbed basically nothing. It was as though I purposely absorbed as little as possible.
Thank you all for your patience as we all get to know the new ropes, which, I understand, do indeed look strikingly, if disappointingly similar to the old ropes. I perhaps may have overhyped the new website as though it was all of a sudden going to be very exciting and flashy, but alas, it is the same old us. Trust me when I say the back end, which is where all the magic happens, is a lot different. It is exactly like when you move a physical shop, and you’ve now got inks in a different place and a better way to display this but a not-quite-as-good way to display that and there’s now a basement with more spiders and possibly leaking plumbing but who’s going in there.
The upside is that things are only going to get better from here! We have the website launched, and from here we can begin to tweak things and work on things that we put off in order to launch.
To no one’s surprise, I’m not great at change, and having to change the way I now put things on the blog has been something I’ve accepted grimly, loudly complaining all the way. This doesn’t auto-save?? What are we, back in university? Why is this text box so small? Why don’t these images fit into here? What happened to all my drafts?? I had hundreds of spam comments languishing in my pending-approval folder for a while, because there are occasionally comments from real people that I need to approve somewhere in there, and there has been a sinking suspicion that the whole thing has been lost, so if you ever wrote a comment on the blog and it never appeared, I’m sorry to say it probably never will. Supposedly Shopify works with a lot of apps so there is a chance I will find one to help me with the blog, although I am not optimistic, as I had a lot of semi-non-functioning plugins on my old Wordpress. Not sure if that’s the same thing. Just that word alone gives me the heebie-jeebies. Plugin.
In any case, it’s been raining for the last ten thousand years here, and I’m just waiting for Jon to start construction on the ark. The pathetic fallacy, for us here in our cave, waiting for things to update and upload and sending frantic emails, would be less ironic if it wasn’t looming to be grey for the next ten thousand years, until spring returns again here in Canada.
But, really, despite the rain, it has been an enormous thing to finally cross off the list, to get this website up and off the ground and floating around in the ether for at least some of you to browse through. It has been many, many, many hours and emails and millions of tiny decisions. And so we are indeed feeling optimistic and grateful. Grateful for customers that have stuck around to reload pages that aren’t working until they do and developers who work late hours. The holly jolly holiday season looms ahead, and we are here for it.
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Hobonichi is here! Because it’s already here, the boxes being sorted through and counted, we’re going to delay launching our new website, just so everyone can navigate their Hobonichi items in a familiar setting.
This is our final shipment from Hobonichi. It’s a big one, there’s lots there, including some new stuff. Some items, mostly just the special edition covers, are out of stock from Hobonichi, which is sadly part of the nature of some of these special edition releases. 5-year planners as well as of course all of the standard planners are coming back in.
Hobonichi items are going to be released to the website on Thursday, October 22nd at 11 am EST. Please don’t hesitate to reach out orders@wonderpens.ca if you have any questions.
In any case, we are rolling onwards. I guess it doesn’t really seem like it since we just apparently delayed our website launch, so we’re more rolling around. In motion, at least.
It’s grey and drizzling here in Toronto, a grim foreboding of the winter season ahead. Chicken is currently passive aggressively displeased with me because he was stuck outside in the rain, and now he’s alternating between licking himself pathetically and eying me from the other end of the couch. But there are bright things in store, and we are counting on the sun to come up eventually.
I’ve, alas, hit a small logistical snag in our pen pal match up but that is to be resolved imminently! This delay in particular has been looming above my head for a while now, my own cloud moving with me. It has been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and quite interesting. I will let everyone know once all the matches have been put into the mail, which should be quite shortly.
I have a few things I’m working on the blog. Nothing tremendously exciting, but things are slowly making their way to the front. It’s the beginning of the week, Monday, which always seems like it’s full of potential, all the things that are going to get crossed off the big lists, progress, launches, exciting weeknight meals to be prepared. Hope you are all off to a good start.
]]>If you receive our email newsletter, where we announce newsy things in a more timely manner, you’ll know that we are gearing up to launch a new website this upcoming Monday, October 19th.
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In case you missed it, here’s all the information:
Enormous news for us! Big changes are in the air, and it’s not just the smell of pumpkin. Several months/years (literally) in the making, we’re now finally launching a new website. It’s not been quite a labour of love, more a labour of endless emails, expensive development costs, and death by a thousand tiny decisions.
The new website is going to be launched next Monday, October 19th, barring any unexpected delights as we barrel forward. It will be down for a few hours, and then back up and running. There are a number of things that aren’t going to be up and running right off the bat, such as our bundle deals, but we hope over time to tweak and grow.
There are going to be some growing pains. For the most part, we expect customer accounts to be migrated over, which includes your previous orders and addresses. Your wish list, however, will likely not be migrated over. If you have a particular number of items in there, your best bet is to print them out or save them somehow, in order to create a new wish list when the new website is up.
If you have a gift certificate, it will likely not work on the new website. Please email us (orders@wonderpens.ca) when you’re placing your order and we will help you out.
If you’ve signed up for back in stock email notifications, we will manually make note of these and manually notify you via email of items as they come back into stock.
Over the years, especially as we’ve grown, we’ve had lots of feedback and suggestions on our website. We’ve taken your feedback very much to heart, and we’ve been working hard on integrating some of your suggestions into the new one. If it is not exactly the dream wonder website you envision, know that it is still a work in progress and technology is unwieldy and developers are very expensive, so if you have kids, you should encourage them to become a website developer when they grow up.
I’ve said all this as though I’ve personally put in the hours to get this new website up and running, when really all I’ve done is eat snacks while complaining and moaning and making unreasonable requests about things that I’d personally like. What do you mean, you can’t redirect people looking up Amazon directly to our small, family-run, independent business? The blog is also potentially migrating and we’re all just holding our breath to see how that’s going to look. Jon and the team have worked incredibly hard to problem solve moving over some of the customizations we’ve made to our current website over the years, to make decisions about how certain product options are going to look, and on the back end, how inventory is going to be managed, on and on it goes.
So the new and improved wonderpens.ca will be launching next week, and we are all very excited. While it will be some time for us as a team to get used to the new system, we’re excited for its possibilities.
An update on Hobonichi: many of you may have signed up for an email notification of an item or items. Some items are out of stock from Hobonichi from our shipment arriving shortly. We are really sorry! We tried our best! We are going to send out an email to everyone who has signed up for an email notification for a Hobonichi item to let you know when Hobonichi has come back in and has launched online. We do not anticipate Hobonichi arriving before the launch of the new website, but it has shipped from Japan.
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In general, 90% of the people who respond to the newsletter are pointing out typos, inaccuracies or have questions around timelines (by soon did you mean 1-2 weeks? 2-3 weeks? because you’ve been talking about getting Kaweco in for a while now).
After yesterday’s newsletter, it was thrilling and also slightly disconcerting that so many of you are excited about the new website. We’re now all slightly worried I’ve hyped it up a bit too much. The best strategy in life and in running a retail shop is have to realistic expectations. Ideally, the website doesn’t crash and people are still able to place orders. That’s sort of where we are. There is definitely still a long list of things that are going to need to be worked on as we go, after we launch, mainly because this is a massive undertaking for us, and at some point, you have to just pull the trigger. Our current website, clunky and cumbersome and complicated as it is, is our cherished and familiar old beast.
A few years ago we did another big website revamp, and that was a lot of work, but that was mostly just a refresh of the whole site. This time, we’re working with developers to move our website to Shopify, which is something we’ve been talking about for years. We looked at Shopify when we first opened, back in 2013, but at that time, it was still early days for both of us, and they didn’t have a lot of easily customizable website options for a shop like ours, that needed to offer nib sizes and sample sizes. As with all things in life, the longer you wait, the harder it is to make the move. We’ve been picking away at it for the last couple of years, delaying other projects in light of the eventuality of this big move, and now it’s here!
I remember once someone from Shopify placing an order with us for some stationery items, and in the order comments they made a friendly and funny sales pitch for us to move to their platform. I had to laugh because I wanted to say I wish! I wish we could! Now if we could just see about getting some more money...
In any case, the date is set. Not exactly in stone, but I think we’re just going to go with whatever happens and then see where we land from there.
In celebration of this great technological event that I actually played basically no part in, I finally ordered a keyboard and iPad stand. The keyboard and cover that I use currently attaches directly to the iPad, so I can’t raise the screen up while still having the keyboard at my arm height. I use an iPad for basically everything except uploading photos because my iPad doesn’t have the right port or hole or slot for a memory card (or any port at all besides the charger), and the internet has informed me that my neck and shoulder cramps are from hunkering down over my screen, my participation in the devolution back into a hunched over caveman.
I got a mechanical keyboard. I’m not going to tell you which one because let me tell you this is a rabbit hole of which I know absolutely nothing. This independent woman had to enlist Jon for help. I’m not sure if this is how people sometimes feel when they’re getting their first fountain pen. Oh, this one is not Bluetooth enabled? But it’s orange and grey, which I think is what I would like. Also, I have no other hole in my iPad. I have to pick a switch? Do I just pick based on the colour I like best? Orange? What do you think, too matchy-matchy? I guess, despite doing a significant amount of my typing at night in the same room as Naomi going to sleep, I indeed would like to make lots of clacking noise. Maximum clacking, please.
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We’ve got a lot to be thankful for!
I suppose I should end it there before I really go off the deep end, this endless rollercoaster that seems to have gone on for an eternity. Time drips and then it’s torrential.
But we are grateful. For our team who are keeping this ship afloat, for healthy kids who can run around in the backyard, for a community of people who are cheering us on and passing our names onto friends and colleagues, for teachers who smile brightly as they drop dollops of sanitizer onto kids’ hands, for a fridge full of food, for books and toys and pens, and even for a crusty cat who mostly only meows when he’s disgruntled. For all the grey hair and the excitement of this adventure.
We are spending this weekend reading library books, making a mess of LEGO in the living room, catching up on laundry. Caleb wrote and illustrated and stapled together this little book about him and Naomi, and it was so magical and lovely that it was in fact successful in momentarily distracting me from their usual chaos and fighting and I happily floated around in my dreams of being a successful mother for a few minutes.
In celebration of a day off, we’ve made a $500 donation to Anishnawbe Health Foundation, which happens to be located down the street from us at the Studio Shop. It’s an Indigenous-led organization that works to support and protect the health of Indigenous people as well as reclaim and protect tradition healing practices.
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If you’re subscribed to our weekly email newsletter (used to go out on Fridays, now goes out on Tuesdays), or are following us on Instagram, you may have already heard that we are closing our brick and mortar shop at 52 Clinton Street again, for the next little while. We’re still going to have curb side pick up on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 12-4, and may be looking at increasing those hours as well.
The numbers in Toronto and Ontario look awful! I’m trying not to be too manic or unhinged about things, although every time we do one of these things we get a lot of feedback from people and I find myself spiralling into conversations that end up in strange places. Some of it is a bit more out there, theories about Russia and Putin, and some of it less so, reminders about significantly increased testing in Ontario naturally resulting in a higher number of positives. Apparently schools are not quite the incubator of the virus as had been feared, and we are all now much more informed and in general, everyone is wearing masks, washing their hands or using sanitizer more frequently, if not religiously. It’s different from what it was in March. But winter is coming, and better safe than sorry, as some people remind us—although who knows how sorry we’ll be if the business ends up wobbling and falling over and we can’t pick it back up.
On the one hand, we’re less stressed about policing customers’ hand-sanitizing and touching and counting people in the shop, but on the other hand, we agonize about weathering the storm and the dip that comes with closing our doors and the holiday season and whether or not it’s going to be a good one. I mean, Christmas is always good. But sometimes, it’s better (in different ways) than others. It has been a life shift for me, going from the joy and busy-ness of Christmas gifts and food and holiday smells to the busy-ness of Christmas as a shop, long hours, tired customers, happy customers, long lists. This upcoming season is going to be a new one for us.
It seems like we’re back where we started, perhaps a bit scragglier. Scraggly, scrappy, same thing right? The first time around, we were a bit dazed, everything was uncertain, it seemed like I hadn’t taken enough notes when I watched the first couple of seasons of The Walking Dead. This time, it’s a bit less grim, a bit more gritted teeth. Caleb’s back in school, Naomi has started preschool, both of which seem like a very hard-won gift, although I don’t personally do any work on that front, other than harassing Caleb about bringing his mask, and where’s your one from yesterday?? And I saw that picture your teacher sent, whose baby carrot is that on the floor, that doesn’t look clean, I hope it’s not from your lunch, my eyes steeled as Caleb’s eyes dart away guiltily, unsure if he actually had baby carrots in his lunch that day. I really like Caleb’s teacher this year, and I hope it doesn’t move to virtual. Hope being probably the best I have at this point. Naomi’s hands are always dry and crusty coming home, that baby skin getting washed and sanitized a thousand times a day.
It was a tough decision, of course, mainly because no shop owner ever wants to have to close their shop. It’s terrible. We’re shop owners, this is what we do, we have a shop that people come into. It’s not quite the same if no one is coming in, and certainly not if our door is locked all the time. It feels final even though, in this case, we’ve done it once before, and we weathered that storm. We’re slightly more battered now, but still here.
All I want is for my kids to be in school, and to be getting into good sorts of trouble and to be listening to their teacher read them stories. Of course, that’s not really all I want. But it seems like the things we can have these days are limited, and every choice is fraught with unsavoury possibilities and side effects.
Jon has been picking up take-out pho for dinner every once in a while, these days. Jon is really into pho, and we’ve been been going to the same pho place on Gerrard in east Chinatown since our days on Carlaw. I like soup noodles as much as the next Asian person, but take-out pho is really not the same. The soup is never hot enough and the meat, which they pack with the noodles separately from the soup, is always still sort of pinkish after you put it in the warm-ish broth, so we have to reheat the soup first, and we’re sitting around waiting for the broth to boil, and we’re fishing bean sprouts of plastic bags and there’s never enough sauce. But the guy at the pho place said it’s been tough this year, probably for all the reasons above. As well as the pandemic.
Wouldn’t it be just awful for that pho place not to be around, though? I mean, yes, for us to not have tasty pho, although I’m sure after some grieving we would pivot to another pho place. But for this family running this pho place, hustling through these tough times, up-selling spring rolls over the phone, I can’t imagine it. Not all Asian people are related, I don’t actually know anything about this particular family, beyond recognizing their faces from whenever we’ve gone there. They think Naomi is funny and cute the same way they thought Caleb was.
But just the knowledge that in particular, these places that make up our east Chinatowns and our downtown Chinatowns, that don’t have an online shop or are on social media, that have extremely perishable merchandise, that are often started and run by immigrants, might not be around after the pandemic. They are not (like us, ho ho ho), the trendy, with-it places that have an Instagram account and that ship things out and that have a snotty shop cat.
So Jon and the kids happily slurp up their noodles, and I grumble about how it’s not the same. And we all just hope that eventually one day we will get back there, and the pho will be the same again.
]]>We went camping! It was a lot of fun. It was also a ton of work getting everything ready, especially with the craziness of September, but it’s been a long season of being at home, and it was nice for the kids, especially Caleb. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse to have kids in this pandemic, to be balancing little humans’ lives with your own limited wisdom and patience, or if perhaps they help keep you grounded.
In any case, we breathed in the fresh and occasionally smoky air from our wet logs, roasted marshmallows around the fire, and the kids got a bunch of mosquito bites. I had vaguely assumed that mosquitoes were mostly over, and they were not, so Jon had to buy some bug spray. The person was surprised that there were still mosquitoes, and then Jon said, blithely, “my wife is susceptible” which somehow also sounds vaguely like I’m just being a huge wuss about things but you know what I was the first one to get a mosquito bite half an hour into things.
Caleb had the most fun I think he’d had in a while. He loved the dirt, the sticks. Before we left, we had borrowed a few books on camping from the library, and one of the activities was making a camp diary, which he made before we left, and he spent time filling that out. He was enthusiastic about everything, from refilling the water, to watching the beans on the fire. Naomi was slightly more ambivalent at times, but she is eager to do everything her big brother does.
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We’re back in Toronto, and back to reality. It’s always nice to be home after time away, back in the comforts of your favourite snacks, your own bed. On the other hand, perhaps we should’ve stayed away a bit longer. The number of cases of Covid here in Toronto are looking poor, to say the least, and we are wending our way through this storm aghast. I mean, no one likes a panicker, but the emperor has no clothes.
]]>I found these things in Naomi’s bag the other day. There’s a metaphor for life somewhere in there. She’s 2, almost 3, and I feel like she is perhaps better prepared for surviving an apocalypse than I am. Naomi is always following and copying her big brother, Caleb, who has been packing his backpack for school for a while now. I’m not at all hurt by the fact that she apparently doesn’t even need a pencil, despite years of evidently failed stationery training. I mean, what good is a fountain pen when you’re being chased by the zombies of life? Keep your feet dry and your soy milk close.
I guess the real metaphor is how unprepared I was for all of this. All I needed were some extra books from the library to get us through three weeks of March Break instead of two, right? Good thing I had all those bottles of special edition inks hoarded in my drawers, instead of hand sanitizer, masks, spare funds to keep a stationery shop afloat, the fortitude to homeschool two feral children, hoisin sauce. Didn’t you used to be a teacher? Everyone asks. Well—yes.
I visited the library the other day. It’s been re-opened for some time now for in-branch browsing, along with picking up your holds. It was empty! Even the computers, usually a very popular if tense area at our local branch. It wasn’t the same, trying to browse through the books without touching them, admiring the spines longingly.
In any case, we are weathering our storm, clinging onto the mast as forty days of rain loom. There are some unpleasant forecasts for what the season ahead holds, the normal flu, kids inside classrooms, a retail Christmas season with a maximum of 5 people in the shop at a time and Canada Post hobbling along with delays ho ho ho, a studio shop that has yet to re-open, Amazon opening up two warehouses just outside of Toronto, really taking advantage of the way the wind is blowing. Stocking up on picture books for the kids, stationery for long letter writing nights, warm socks.
]]>Yesterday I posted a bunch of Instagram Stories of some of the new 2021 Hobonichi covers and accessories and things.
It’s overwhelming and thrilling and there are so many new things this year. Every year there are new covers, but this year in particular, it seems like there are so many new things that are now available to retailers and we’re so thrilled to be carrying them.
They’re coming to the website soon—over the next couple of days. I thought about waiting to do this blog post until everything is up, but instead I thought I would give you some info now so you can be prepared as things go up. This is one of the most exciting seasons for stationery nerds as we prepare for the new year. 2021 is swooping down upon us and thank goodness for that.
There is a lot coming. Please bear with us as we add it all online. It should all be coming over the next day or two. It will also be available for browsing in store (our hours are Wed, Fri, Sat 12-4 at the Main Shop; curbside pick up available at Studio Shop, please reach out to book an appointment).
This is our first shipment, and it’s nice and early in the year. There should be additional shipments coming. Once everything is added online, if something does get sold out, I strongly suggest you sign up for an email in stock notification, so you get an automatic email once it comes back in. Because these are seasonal or special edition, and sometimes dated items, this is your one “season” of the year to grab a lot of these items.
Lots of new covers! Shaun Tan!(!!) Liberty! A time-traveling bird with a letter! There are also a lot of accessories this year, including rubber stamps, stencils, pencil boards, and (undated) notebooks. We also have the 5-year journals in A5 and A6, as well as all the standard planners (cousin, weeks, techo).
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It has been a year. And in particular, these last few weeks have been a bit hairy as we try to get ourselves ready for back to school, squeezing in the last of what we’d like to do together as a family, for the kids, along with trying to get all the things we need, the shoes, debating the pros and cons of various water bottles in a water-fountain-less school, while wondering if a reusable water bottle is going to be a COVID carrier and if we should just do daily plastic water bottles which is a thought that is so abhorrent that we bought the Spiderman water bottle. My sewing machine broke just as I was trying to get my mask production ramped up, and everyone was trying to explain to me how to use it, and I was trying to explain to everyone that it really was broken, and it wasn’t just me. Caleb has a little bottle of hand sanitizer for his backpack and I’m already envisioning it cracking open and seeping out everywhere.
With all the craziness of the coming school year and finishing off this year that I can’t wait to have as just a memory, it’s a lovely things to get lost in a bit of stationery for a while. A glorious and exciting decision where you can be as anal as you like, and not worry about long-lasting psychological impacts on your children other than them having a parent who is a little nutty.
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Things are trucking on here, and it’s hard to believe we’re already at the end of August. It feels like from the beginning of all this in early March to now has been a twilight zone and here we are bypassing all of the summer heat and sunshine right into the school year again, although here in Toronto, school has been delayed an extra week, until mid-September. Another twilight zone sort of thing.
In the midst of the pervasive and humming anxiety of making decisions for our children that may or may not be the right ones, of running a stationery shop in a pandemic and in this era in general, we are celebrating the tiny things. Audiobooks while hanging laundry, Caleb writing a story about a family of squirrels from Narnia dressing up like humans and moving to England, like the hyenas from The Bolds. All the different worlds swimming together in a stew. Crispy dumplings from the cast iron pan, the kids flinging peanuts around the backyard to try attract more squirrels, our Chinese neighbour trying to explain to them in Chinese that the squirrels are eating all of her squash. Ordering more board books for Naomi, trying to hold onto the last dredges of toddlerhood, as she goes off to preschool, this independent and wild child off to blossom without me hovering over her. Sending letters out into the world, addressed to unsuspecting victims. Suspiciously low library fine amounts that I’m not looking any deeper into. Forcing the cat to acknowledge my existence in his life by bothering him while he’s sleeping.
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Currently reading: Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Current shop task: organizing and re-organizing the 14 stock items leftover in the studio shop for display, as we prepare for some curbside pick ups here.
Currently waiting for: my sewing machine to come back from the repair shop.
Currently writing with: Pilot Custom 74s, a TWSBI, several Lamy safaris strewn about the house.
Currently strategy for getting through life: a package of Reese’s pieces in my backpack that I snack on intermittently throughout the day, and then mumbling nothing to my children when they ask what I’m eating, those nosy scavengers.
The Superior Labor has released a lovely collection of holiday special editions and items. We’re offering them as a pre-order and they’re live on our website now. In the midst of this heat and sunshine and everything else going on, a tiny peek into the joy of the season ahead.
A lot of these items are just here for a limited time, and with the ordering window so tight before the holiday season is upon us, we don’t want anyone to be disappointed. It’s always exciting to browse through, and we hope the extra time to take a look will give you enough time to make any decisions.
We are going to be bringing more in for the shop, but if sometime grabs your eye, your best way to get it is to get it during the pre-order. Anything that arrives and is in stock on our website will just show as a regular item, and you would be able to purchase it and it would ship as normal (1-3 processing days).
There are some different timelines for different items, so some things may ship to us before others. Some items are anticipated to arrive in December, based on Superior Labor’s manufacturing schedule, and so may not be great purchases if you absolutely need them to be waiting for you under the Christmas tree, as there is always the possibility of delays due to increased volume getting through international customs around the holidays, shipping delays from our warehouse to your house. Everyone is going to try their best! Including our incredible Canada Post people. Please look carefully at the description of the items, which will indicate what the approximate delivery timeline is.
If you would like items to ship as they come, please place separate orders for them. For example, if two items are estimated to arrive and ship in October, and one item in December, we encourage you to place your October items in one order, and your December item in another, and they will get shipped separately. Otherwise, we’ll ship them once your entire order comes in.
Check out all of the Superior Labor Holiday 2020 Pre-Order items here.
We are very much hoping that everything will arrive before Christmas. If there was ever a Christmas when we needed Santa to show up on time, this is the one! However, life has shown us that sometimes we need to embrace the unexpected, and I suppose if there was ever a year that even Santa needs a little grace, this is the one.
We are tremendously grateful for those of you who are thinking of us for your birthday gifting needs, who are sending mystery pen packs to people who need cheering up, and the holiday season ahead.
]]>It’s been a long time coming—a plague can only stop us for a couple of months!—and a very, very difficult secret to keep tight on, but we are so excited and proud to announce that we’re now a Partner Shop for Traveler’s Company.
You can read about our shop and some of our recommended travel spots on their website here as well as browse some of the other great Partner Shops and their travel spots to add to your travel lists. If you’re local to us here in Toronto, you might recognize some of the travel spots that we picked—it was a tough choice, narrowing things down. And it was a lot of fun to trek around the city and take pictures of some of our favourite places. It’s a bit of a double take for me to scroll through the photos from last fall, and it’s already fall again. Time is fickle.
We are looking forward to welcoming you all back to a Traveler’s Notebook meet up soon, although I’m not sure what that will look like, when things as intimate and informal as journaling together will happen again.
Being a Partner Shop means we’ve started to carry some of the Traveler’s Factory exclusive items in our brick and mortar. Right now only the Main Shop is open, but once the Studio Shop is open, we’ll be carrying them there as well. Please stop by and take a look! We won’t be carrying it online, but here’s a little sneak peek at a few of the exclusive items we’ll be carrying. Black paper inserts, airplane clips, cloth organizers. Eek!
All of the new accessories are so much fun, and the excitement of indecision and small ways to make our Traveler’s Notebooks more customized and special are a much-needed treat in this time. But we’re mostly just thrilled to be a Partner Shop. Everyone on the team at Traveler’s Company is so lovely and sweet and creative and thoughtful, and it’s reflected throughout all of their products, collaborations and philosophy. The Traveler’s Notebook has been a mainstay of our shop from its tiny infanthood to its current hobbled state, and the connections we’ve made with our customers and visitors who are Traveler’s Notebook users is unique.
I love how much Traveler’s Company values and celebrates traveling, meeting new people, experiencing new things, using analogue tools, but how in this time of the global pandemic, they are still celebrating what it means to connect with local shops and people around the world. There is no replacement for actually setting foot in a new country, riding the trains, tasting street food, scribbling things down in our notebooks, but we can celebrate small joys and make plans in the meantime.
What a wild ride seven years of a stationery shop and a pandemic have been. We are so excited for what’s ahead, and all of the unexpected detours and adventures along the way.
]]>Another week! A big one for us, as we re-opened the main shop. It wasn’t quite the exciting gala event with glorious fanfare and snacks and drinks and balloons, but it was a lovely thing for us, to re-open.
In other news, we’ve been spending a bit of time sprucing up the front, clearing out dead leaves, trimming things back, pulling up weeds from between the bricks. Dirt under everyone’s nails, the cat lounging in the shade.
It was perhaps a bit misleading: people walking by wondered if we were open, if we were getting ready to re-open. Alas, no, although we are considering a curb-side pick up time from this location for people who are in the east end. We are not quite there yet for the studio shop. We’re staggering along, trying to wait and see how things are going and trying not to wait too long before we’ve missed too many boats. It’s a lot to manage both shops, inventory and staff, and things going on. We’re circling the wagons, and the main shop and the shipping operations are the thrust of things right now.
We’re ramping up for back to school as well. Ontario has announced that students will be heading back into the classroom full time in the fall, and while I’m not too sure how I feel about it all, it’s a new world, and I guess we all have to get adjusted to it. I’m trying my best not to get too neurotic, but I’m also slightly unhinged to begin with. How do you get five year olds to stay away from each other? Not share pencils? Snacks? Bathrooms? I added a “share size” pack of Haribo cola gummies to my online grocery cart.
At the beginning of all this, I couldn’t wait for things to get back to normal, and now it seems like this new version normal is coming at us too soon. Super is getting old, we’re looking at preschools for Naomi, we’re negotiating extra curricular activities, Caleb is attacking things with the plastic golf club he got from his grandpa. The downtown T&T has been closed since forever and we ran out of hoisin sauce so we had to buy tiny, overpriced bottles of hoisin from Loblaws which actually owns T&T so you’d think they would offer a better deal. Jon has been rationing it, our own sauce gestapo. Chicken is passive aggressively skulking about all the outside doors because no one will let him inside with the live mouse inside its mouth. This kids are thrilled with this unexpected entertainment.
In any case, we’re all managing. Even with everything going on, these are truly blue sky days. The kids are happy and healthy. The team is keeping the shop humming. The library is re-opening. My favourite season, fall, is coming soon enough. There are books to read, pens to ink up, babies to squeeze.
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This is it, everyone! After months of being closed, it’s hard to believe that we’re sort of re-opening.
Our new hours are:
Wednesday 12-4
Friday 12-4
Saturday 12-4
Things will change as we go, and we very much hope to increase the hours. It’ll depend on how busy things are, and how we’re able to balance things as a team (maintaining our shipping operations efficiently, staffing, cleaning procedures, maintaining safe shopping inside the store during our opening hours), as well as of course government guidelines and suggestions. The numbers seem to look good in Toronto, although it seems like we’re destined to wear masks for another couple of years. That’s neither here nor there.
I suppose it’s a bit early to celebrate before we know how things are going to go down, but perhaps it’s best to celebrate anyways. It’s been a slog.
In any case, here are a few photos from getting ready. It’s hard to believe, all of it.
]]>Happy Emancipation Day!
On August 1st, 1834, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, which includes Canada. History is, of course, quite a bit messier than a flick of a switch, and while we in Canada are often proud of our diversity and multi-culturalism and especially things like our Underground Railroad, we also have had slavery, bigotry, and overt and systemic racism with effects lasting to today.
Toronto recently released information on COVID-19 infection rates based on race, as well as by other measures, and it would surprise no one to see how it has disproportionately affected Black and other racialized communities.
To celebrate Emancipation Day, we’ve made a $500 donation to Black Health Alliance, a community-led charity that works across Canada to address and improve the racial disparities in health outcomes of Black communities.
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With Toronto reporting only 1 new case yesterday, what better way to celebrate than a safe and exciting trip to your favourite stationery shop?
We’re re-opening! As of Friday, August 7 we are going to be re-opening for in-store browsing. It’s been a ride.
Albeit in a limited capacity, we are still here for you for trying out pens, admiring the inks, and finding just the right journal.
Wednesday 12-4
Friday 12-4
Saturday 12-4
These are, you may notice, similar to our curbside pick up hours (they are exactly the same) and they are not long hours. We are going to see how things go, and tweak as necessary, possibly increasing our hours as we go.
We have moved our furniture around a bit to create a U, so traffic will flow in and out in one direction. There will be indications on the floor. We’re not going to police anybody, but just trying to help things flow more efficiently with less back and forth. We’ve made some changes to our displays, and are still working on adjusting things.
When you come in, please use some hand sanitizer at the door. If you’re trying out any pens at pen display, we ask that you use hand sanitizer again, which will be at the pen counter.
Toronto has a bylaw in effect requiring everyone who is able to to wear a mask. We request that instead of wearing gloves, you sanitize your hands in the shop with our provided hand sanitizer. We are going to limit it to five customers in the shop at a time. We are going to try our best to help everyone who visits, but outside of our posted in-store browsing hours, please note that our hours are limited because we have limited staff, extra cleaning, and a lower ratio of staff to customers.
We are nervous and thrilled that we’ve managed to stagger to this stage. Everyone talks about how many small businesses and restaurants will survive or not survive, but I feel like as important as merely surviving is making it out in good enough shape to continue to onward in a meaningful way. To not just keep the lights on, but to continue offer paid health benefits to our staff, to take risks on new lines, to staff free community events.
We are thrilled to be here, thrilled that we’ve arrived at this stage for Toronto, and for our shop, and thrilled to see what’s ahead. Thank you all for your support, encouragement, patience, orders, funny comments, likes, live chats, friendship and appreciation of our favourite pens and stationery.
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Last week there was a huge thunderstorm while we were all at the main shop and we had to rush home because Chicken was caught out in the storm. He is not a cat that likes water or rain or in fact even stepping onto wet ground, so the entire family had to pack everything up to come home and rescue him. The thunderstorm was relatively short-lived, and by the time we all made it into car, it had already stopped raining. We came home, and I called him from the top of the fire escape, and he came slinking out from through our neighbours’ backyards. He has certain holes in fences he likes to make his way through, and I stood there watching him make his way through the obstacle course of puddles. He made his way all the way up to us pathetic and also totally dry.
We forge on! We’re (very, very) slowly getting ready for re-opening. We don’t have a firm timeline, but we are looking at sometime in August. The earlier the better, everyone keep your fingers crossed for us. We’re stocking up on things, debating how we’re going to enforce mask wearing according to Toronto’s city bylaw, Jon got in this UV wand thing.
We contemplated doing more of a front door shopping service, but as of right now it seems like most people who are looking to come by want to actually hold a pen, or see how different nib widths write. Some people want to come by to just browse, discover new treasures. We’re going to be ready! With some exciting new things as well.
This place is coming back to life again.
]]>The longer this whole thing goes on, the less I seem to have to update each week (although we are working on re-opening still). And yet I forge on.
We’ve begun heading out to Allan Gardens for late afternoon picnics, which is lovely. Allan Gardens is as full of interesting people as ever, along with ants and bees and big shady trees, all of which lend a very unique flavour to the park. They recently cut down a real giant of a tree, which is sad, although after every major storm, it seems like the park is littered with massive branches. The library is open for curb side pick up, and sometimes we go the park after we pick up our books.
In any case, there’s not much to update. Restaurants around the city have been enjoying their patios. Because we have the kids, we haven’t ventured out too much ourselves—we generally pick up take out and eat it semi-warm on our own terrace, where the kids can run around.
We’re sort of taking this quiet, unusual summer season for what it is. Before we know it, it’ll be an entirely new sort of back to school. We’re already scrolling through online catalogues of fall things, 2021 things, new things. I feel like I’m not quite ready for time to continue marching on, in giant, stomping footsteps, but then again, maybe starting a fresh new 2021 agenda is something to look forward to.
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To my complete and utter delight, the other day my jasmine plant bloomed. These tiny white flowers that I haven’t seen for years, and the fragrance! After years of neglect, under watering and sitting in the shadows: flowers. Nature is healing.
We are indeed slowly being overtaken by plants, and it has been lovely. I was trying to explain a reference to Caleb about how the front yard of the studio shop is like J.G Ballard’s the Drowned World, and his reference was Poison Ivy so I guess to each his own.
Another week here, and we are as glad to be here as ever. The AC is fixed. The oppressive heat is drying my laundry outside as fast as I can bring it out. I’m filling up my pens with glorious Jentle inks. I’m trying hard to embrace the concept of seasons of life, and perhaps one of them will be the season of life when Jentle inks were abundant.
As we move over into the languid, slow, stultifying summer months, I am embracing the opportunity to get ready to re-open, and to tweak things behind the scenes, and to write letters late into the night.
We are seeing more and more shops we re-open and we are working on it. Another week, and another update that says the same thing. Toronto has instituted a mandatory indoor mask policy, and we are grateful that city leadership has taken this step, although we wonder what enforcing it will look like in a small shop like ours. We are excited to welcome you all back soon, although what that looks like is still sorting itself out.
So there’s not much to update. We’ve gotten lots in, and I’ve been admiring the shelves full of neatly stacked notebooks. Dylan did some re-organizing of some of the shelves in the back and it’s a simple joy in life, to look at warehouse shelves of stationery all neatly sorted into spots. On we go.
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Things continue to be sunny and hairy around here. We had a successful inventory day, and we counted a lot of things. We got a few shipments in that we were holding off on counting so as to not make inventory more complicated, and those are slowly sorting themselves out again. Our favourite distributors at Crestar sent us these Pilot branded page flags and I’m pretty excited about them.
We are still working on re-opening, and the timeline is still loose. It’s the same news every week, and I apologize for there not being more of an update, especially as we see other stores beginning to open up and figure things out. We always seem one step behind things, and it’s no exception here. We’re struggling with how to approach a lot of things, mainly that our shop is a high touch shop, physically. We don’t want to have to have our staff police mask wearing, or hand sanitizing if someone touches their face in between trying out a pen, and we’re hearing so many stories of both tough interactions and good resolutions of conflicts between people based on different comfort levels of safety out in public. We strongly believe the best way to stay in business is to serve people the best we can, and we’re just working on figuring out what that is.
We miss you all. A regular customer, who had stopped by for a curbside pick up, and was walking up Clinton, waved at us when we were driving up the street on our way home and it was so heart-warming you’d think we were heading off to war or something, floating away on an ocean liner. Lots of things have changed since the beginning of the pandemic that we can’t wait to set up in store: washi tape displays, all the new books we’ve begun carrying and want to talk with you about.
There’s been a heat wave in Toronto recently, and we’ve been making iced coffee. We ran out of ice cube trays here, so I had to resort to using these silicone gummy bear trays I once bought several years ago in a fit of trying to convince myself that I was an excellent and crafty mother and have not since used once. They’re terrible for pouring coffee into, these tiny bear holes, all in a jiggly silicone tray, but once they’re swimming around in my coffee they’re sort of cute. Plus I don’t feel like it was a total waste of money or cupboard space to have kept these trays that I never otherwise use. Plus, because the bears are very small, when they start melting down a bit, they’re very satisfying to crunch. It’s the small things in life.
]]>INVENTORY DAY! We were ready. Ballpoints, gel pens, broken glasses. The wonder team is nothing but eager to count stationery.
We count up everything, we discover boxes of things, we wonder if we’ve counted things, we absolutely in no way at all ever make guesstimates about things like numbers of samples, or numbers of 5-packs of vials in enormous loose bags of them. We Are Precision! Efficiency! Mental Math Giants!
I’m just kidding. The team is actually shockingly efficient at getting through the shelves. “13284. 8. 947. 56569.” “13284. 8. 947. 56569.”
In all honesty, I am the weakest link. It doesn’t sound like it would be very tricky, but all those washi tapes have different skus and dashes they’re sometimes separated by one digit and it’s tricky find them on those spreadsheets. “Hooold on....just wait. Uhm...was that 89? You said? Wait, I already have a number here for that one. Is that the pink one?”
I was assigned to order the pizza, which was accomplished with only slight difficulty.
A surprise advantage to having the shop closed down is that the whole team can eat lunch together in the glory of the sun.
In any case, we got it all done in one day. Inconsistent naming conventions faced their yearly curse. Various people were blamed for taking a few items from various new boxes instead of taking from the already opened one. In prep for inventory day, Dylan already counted and organized some of the things which sped things up. There were a few last minute, impulsive decisions to discontinue items. Caleb was assigned to wait at the door for the pizza delivery. At the end of the day, Jon went home spreadsheets with numbers scrawled over them and stayed up late, cranky, directly in front of the fan.
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