Laura Hooper Calligraphy

Please tell us about your work.

I’ve owned and operated Laura Hooper Calligraphy for 15 years now, the last four with my sister & Director of Operations, Alyssa. We offer full-service calligraphy and/or stationery for our wedding clients, teach modern calligraphy around the US via our in-person workshops, sell a starter kit + video tutorial {our video tutorial is included in the Art Bundle for Good and our kit correlates with that!} for at-home learning, offer our preferred calligraphy supplies via our online shop, and also carry a line of party goods for weddings, baby showers & everyday entertaining, all featuring my lettering. It has been such a joy to share the art of modern calligraphy with so many around the world, both by educating aspiring calligraphers as well as executing creative projects with our colleagues in the wedding industry.

Workshops seem like the perfect complement to a creative services business like calligraphy, does each side of the business promote the other?

While we do have some clients that end up taking our workshop, and some workshop attendees end up booking us for their wedding services, we do ultimately have two client bases. The most overlap is with the entertaining goods that we sell – our clients continue to purchase those products from us for years after their wedding. If you are looking to offer workshops, you definitely want to be sure to schedule time accordingly for your handwritten work as you don’t want to disappoint your custom clients.

How did you get started with calligraphy?

I learned broad edge calligraphy first when I was about 12 years old from my mom, then when I was in my early 20’s, I offered to address my best friend’s wedding envelopes – all 200+ of them! My dad referred me to his co-worker’s daughter’s wedding, my sister referred me for her boss’s wedding…and it grew over time starting with word of mouth. I did calligraphy work on-the-side for about two years before going full-time.

Did you formally study any type of art?

Nothing formal beyond high school AP Art. I did study business in college, though, which helped me significantly in the early years.

You have a large Instagram following, can you tell us how it has impacted your business?

We joined Instagram fairly early in the game and having already been in the business for over a decade at the time, the Laura Hooper Calligraphy brand was already somewhat known in the wedding industry which helped us develop a larger following from the beginning.

Bloggers & other vendors shared work freely (“influencers” wasn’t really a monetized concept yet) and there was no Instagram algorithm. Anyone that wanted to see what we were sharing could easily see it, and the platform was not overly saturated. That was extremely helpful when we were launching our starter kit and workshops back in late 2013/early 2014 and we do still frequently have people tell us they saw us on Instagram, so it has only impacted us positively for our growth as a business.

Do you have any tips or advice for artists promoting on Instagram?

There’s so much advice in this category! We recommend sharing well-lit, clear images that show your work in its best light. We also try to share content that represents the type of projects that we would like to work on for our ideal clients. If I don’t love a project or I don’t feel like it best represents our brand, we don’t share that. Posting with intent is key – anytime you are sharing an image it can help to think about why you are sharing that image and what you are trying to convey.

Be genuine in your approach, engage with your followers (this is easier now than ever to at the very least “like” someone’s comment on your post even if you don’t have time to reply to all comments) and share consistently, but not too much, so that your followers are looking forward to what you will share next. Also be sure to look at your feed as a whole if you want to maintain your brand image and attract new followers (i.e. potential new clients/customers). If someone happens to land on your feed and it’s not aesthetically pleasing overall, they are not likely to engage or follow. A basic app to help with this is Planoly where you can easily see how your content fits together as well as schedule your posts.

A few other common courtesy tips are to always credit other vendors in your initial caption if their work is shown in your image when working on a collaboration, sharing an image with product that someone donated to you, or sharing a real wedding image. It is the polite thing to do, and as a vendor you would want the same in return. Never use someone else’s image without their consent and credit in the initial caption. Even if it is a photograph of your work, they own the copyright on any image/content that they created.

Do you feel there are good business opportunities for artists and creative service businesses like yours?

Yes, definitely. The field is certainly growing and there are niche areas for almost every creative endeavor. If you love designing stationery with fonts, you can focus on stationery. If you only want to offer hand-calligraphy you can work with clients that already have their stationery. You can offer calligraphy and stationery design/printing. You can specialize in wood signage. If you don’t want to take on envelope orders, you can specialize in custom, one-of-a-kind pieces (we specifically don’t offer these and refer inquiries to other artists we know that do offer it).

I think something key to remember is that you don’t have to do everything. If you are dipping your hand in too many pots it can become increasingly difficult to manage, but if you are looking to grow into new offerings, it can help to outsource certain aspects of your business or bring on team members to allow you to better focus your skills.

Do you have any advice for artists interested in getting started with calligraphy?

If you are looking to learn the art of calligraphy, we definitely recommend a starter kit or in-person workshop from a seasoned professional. You want to be sure you are getting high-quality tools in addition to instruction on how to make them work for you. We frequently hear from customers that wanted to get a “cheaper” starter kit so they bought something online only to find it included a pen holder, nib, ink and alphabet – no instructions on how to actually use them!

Ultimately they end up spending even more to get our quality kit with tools curated for beginners and instructions based on my 15 years experience adapted even more over the past four years of teaching in-person.