Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by our page.
We’ve been running Elle Bee – for short – since 2013 and we’re happy that you’ve found us! We thought it might be nice to tell you a little bit about us and our history as it’s very different to when we started!
Elle Bee began life in 2013 as a hobby; a distraction for Laura outside of her 9-5 day job where she rediscovered her long-lost love of cardmaking. Simple at first, these cards soon developed into more elaborate, decorative cards which found a home on an Etsy shop and proved popular with customers in the UK and further afield.
The range of cards grew – as did the number of tools and bits of machinery required to make them! – and soon orders were getting regular enough to plant the seed of what it would be like to turn a hobby into a business.
And in order to do that, we expanded by turning our attention to weddings, applying the same techniques and materials used in our cards to invitations and stationery. This was in 2015.
Our invitations and stationery, like cards, started purely on a handmade basis with an emphasis on tradition; ribbons, embellishments and decorative paper with the goal of creating something luxurious, entirely crafted by hand. These designs – which are still offered today – also soon found an audience and we started to receive bookings.
But we were receiving too many to handle in our spare time; for the first time we were turning couples away due to not having the availability. And not all couples wanted the handmade approach, or something traditional. So we expanded again, through the use of digital printing which we introduced in 2016. Ian’s the computer person, so outside of his day job taught himself how to use design software (of which out of the 1000 of buttons that can be pressed, he probably knows how to use about 6 of them!).
At first, we entirely outsourced digital printing to a printing company. This was a mainstay running alongside our handmade ranges for two years – whilst handmade orders required bookings in advance, digitally-printed designs could be turned around quickly.
However, we wanted to be more versatile and we wanted more control, whilst offering a more competitive price for our couples. That’s when we made our biggest investment to date, with Bertha, who we brought home in late 2018.
So, what is Bertha, I hear you ask?! Well, Bertha is a professional A3 LED laser printer. She weighs 100kgs and is roughly 60cm x 60cm x 60cm – she’s a big old unit. She gained the nickname from the kids’ TV show of the same name from the 80s, Bertha was a massive machine in a factory – the nickname seemed appropriate!
With Bertha in the studio, this enabled us to massively expand and completely re-imagine our digitally printed designs and as the timing matched up with engagement season, we were soon taking more bookings than ever.
Orders were so frequent that we needed to convert one of our rooms into a stock room, with all of our different cardstock and envelopes ready to go for customer orders. And over the course of 2019 we realised that Bertha really does love a drink; her favourite is black toner which she’s especially thirsty for!
From Elle Bee growing steadily initially through to rapid expansion, time was at a stretch as we were both working full-time.
In September 2019 that all changed. Laura left her day job of 12 years for the very last time to work on Elle Bee full-time. This will culminate in the launch of a brand new website, as we wanted to provide couples – if they wanted the hand-on approach – with the tools to configure and purchase their own products without the need of a quote; we’re kind of proud of it, and we hope you enjoy using it when it launches. We supported this by doing the very grown up thing of getting our own trademark, too! We want to reassure customers that we’re in this for the long haul, whilst it’s something we massively enjoy, this is no longer just a hobby.
So, today, Elle Bee continues to be run from our home studio in Worcester, which we share with our cats Jackson and Lilly. Laura works on it full-time, Ian works on it part-time. Our dream is to do this together full-time, if we can!
It is just the two of us – unless you count Bertha, or the cats, of course – and whilst we don’t know how much further we’ll grow in the future, we’d like it to stay as just the two of us. As whilst we put our heart and soul into offering a professional service and a quality product, we also want to be personable, welcoming and easy to approach.
We’re not fond of the stuffiness that can sometimes be found in this industry and in telling couples what to do; we want to keep things simple, provide guidance when it’s asked for and put our couples in control.
To all the customers and couples that have enabled us to reach this far, we’re eternally grateful. To any prospective customers that are reading this – and thanks for reading this far! – we hope we can help you too and if we do, we hope your experience with Elle Bee is positive and stress-free.
Laura & Ian - Elle Bee Design
