Janna Willoughby-Lohr has always wanted to be an artist. Still, she didn’t want to be a starving artist, so she created her own major in college–integrating entrepreneurial business and creative art together. After losing her mother and surviving a dorm fire in college, she began making and sharing paper art about grief, trauma, and coming back to life. Seeing the effect her art had on other people inspired her to name her company Papercraft Miracles because this work is the miracle that saved her when she literally had nothing. She has now been making and selling art and affecting positive change for over 20 years
“Everything we do is designed to either be cherished and reused for a long-time or to be easily returnable to the earth because if you’re going to have stuff, it should matter.” – Janna Willoughby-Lohr
Takeaways:
Keep Going Even When Times Are Tough: Janna faced some really hard times, like losing her mom and having a fire destroy her belongings. Instead of giving up, she used these experiences to inspire her art and business.
Stay True to Your Purpose: Janna believes it’s important to stick to what her business stands for when deciding on new products or services. This helps keep everything aligned with her values.
Balance Work and Life: She makes sure to take care of herself by performing and creating art. This self-care helps her stay energized and creative for her business.
A Strong Team is Vital: Janna was able to take maternity leave because she built a reliable team that could run the business in her absence. This shows how important it is to have good people around you.
Embrace Variety in Your Work: Instead of just focusing on one thing, Janna’s business thrives because it can tackle different projects and challenges. This flexibility is part of what makes her company special.
Life and business are going to be full of ups and downs: Remember that you can never stay too long at the low point of your tides.
Can you start by introducing yourself and telling us in your words, about your inspiring story?
I’m a poet, artist, musician, speaker, and entrepreneur from Buffalo, NY. My business is called Papercraft Miracles and it is an eco-friendly handmade paper art company. We make magical things out of paper that make people happy and help them to connect, communicate and celebrate in unique and meaningful ways. We create handmade papers & stationery, paper flowers, handbound books and other decor. We also make lots of seed paper products that grow when you plant them! Specializing in sustainable weddings & events, installations, corporate gifting, and custom orders, everything we do is designed to either be cherished and reused for a long time or to be easily returnable to the earth because if you’re going to have stuff, it should matter.
I always knew I wanted to be a creative, but the path to my sparkly wonderland wasn’t always so sparkly. I initially went to college on a creative writing scholarship but ended up taking many bookbinding and papermaking classes instead. At the end of my freshman year, I met with my advisor and said, “These are all the classes I took! What major am I working towards??” And he said, “Those are all electives, so…nothing.” Terrified, I asked, “What am I supposed to do now??” And he asked me a question that changed the course of my life forever. “What do you want to do?” I told him, “I want to be an artist, but I don’t want to be broke…how do I do that?” And he said, “You should do that as your major.”
I ended up creating my own major, integrating entrepreneurial business and creative art together in one course of study, and I spent the rest of my college career figuring out how to make and sell art–as a business. By the time I graduated, I had a 25-page business plan, a super crappy Angelfire website, a domain name, a print catalog, and some business cards; for all intents and purposes, I was ready to start a business. But college also brought me a lot of personal challenges that have affected the rest of my life.
Three weeks into my junior year, my mom died…on Friday the 13th. And then, just four months later, on what would have been my mom’s next birthday, my dorm burnt to the ground with all my stuff in it…while I was in it. I know…it was brutal. I kept thinking, “Where’s the cancer and the bus that’s coming to hit me? I’m waiting.”
But I knew the fire on her birthday was no coincidence. I could tell she was sending me a lesson. I just had to figure out what it was. Three days after the fire, it hit me. I looked at my roommate, and I exclaimed, “DUDE! All our shit burnt up!” And we both started laughing, like rolling around on the ground like a bunch of crazy people laughing, because it was suddenly so clear that we didn’t need any of that stuff to survive. See, growing up with my mother was a wild experience because she was a total hoarder. I didn’t even know we had hardwood floors until I was 20 years old because I never saw them. So to all of a sudden have all my precious things burn up in a literal cloud of smoke on her birthday, it was obvious to me that she was sending me a lesson that she had never learned in her lifetime–that your stuff doesn’t matter. And that is a big deal for a young college kid to learn because at 20 years old, your only mark of success as a person is the things that you own. You don’t yet have a career or a network, you have stuff. But all of a sudden, I saw that real human success has nothing to do with stuff or accomplishments at all. It’s about the connection with the world, yourself, and other people. Because you really only need five things to survive. You need food. You need water. You need shelter. You need someone that loves you and something that drives you. Everything else is just cake.
Not that dealing with all of this was easy, but having that completely different worldview all of a sudden made the grieving process a lot easier for me. During this time where any one of these things would have been a reason to quit school and go back home, I chose to dig further into my major and my creative practice. I spent countless nights in the art studio writing poetry and creating artist’s books about my experiences with grief, trauma, and what I was learning about coming back to life. Artist’s books are my absolute favorite art form because the form, the design, the words, the illustrations, the materials, the way it sounds when you open it and the way it feels when you open it, all work together to create a bigger concept or a bigger idea…a full-body experience, if you will. I began setting up these “Show & Tell” events where I would read the poems and stories in my books while showing people these artist’s books and talking about how and why I made them. And people would come up to me afterward and they would cry and say, “I’m a different person than I was before I saw that.”
I thought that making this art had helped me to heal, but I had no idea that sharing it with others was really what I needed. Inspiring other people to confront their fears, pursue their dreams, and to connect with themselves and the people around them was really what brought me back to life. I knew right then that I had found my purpose. I knew I wanted to help people to find that connection and I wanted to do it as often and as intentionally as possible. I named my business Papercraft Miracles because it was the miracle that saved me when I literally had nothing.
“Ask for help, ask for help, ask for help, and then take it when it is offered.” – Janna Willoughby-Lohr
We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
While I technically was ready to start a business as soon as I graduated from college in 2004, I had a lot of adult responsibilities that had to come first. I inherited my mom’s house back in Buffalo, which needed a lot of work. She also didn’t have a will, so I was responsible for taking care of the house and making repairs, but I had no money, agency, or authority over it. I ended up working as an Assistant Manager at a gas station for five years, but all the while I was still doing poetry and music in the evenings and making art for my friends and family for their weddings and celebrations.
In 2008, I got together with my husband, Bryan, who is also an artist and musician, and we started building this life together. He believed in my paper dreams from day one. We got married in 2011 and began looking for a property to buy where we could both have art studios, play music as loud as we wanted, have a sweet place to live, and have a space that I could someday turn into a papermaking studio. We found the perfect building in 2013, an amazingly beautiful old department store from the 1890s. This was the same year that I decided to finally make my business my official side hustle. Even though I had always had the dream in the back of my mind, I was still afraid to make the leap into being a full-time artist right away, especially since we had a huge mortgage to pay.
In 2015, when I had my first son and my job didn’t allow me to work from home to accommodate my childcare needs, I was forced to quit. It was terrifying—the first time since I was 20 years old that I wasn’t getting a paycheck, and we now also had the added expense of having a child…and I had lost my health insurance. I had no idea how we would make it work on one income. But my husband just said, “We’ll figure it out. Just stay home and do your book thing.”
Two months after I quit my job, I was up in the middle of the night, nursing my baby and doing market research on Instagram so I wouldn’t fall asleep. When I searched for #papermaking, I saw someone selling used papermaking equipment! I couldn’t believe the timing. I emailed them immediately, and they sent me the list of what they had available. Now, way back when I was dreaming up my business in college, I had written out a list of all the equipment I would buy when I finally had the money and the right space for a paper studio. I had that list hanging over my desk for twelve years at this point. The list they sent had every single thing on my list…and more. I made them an offer, they accepted and my husband flew to Indiana to pick it up. He drove it back to Buffalo and installed it in our basement. Then I said, “Take this baby, I’m gonna go make paper!” and the rest is history.
How did you market your business when it was brand new?
After quitting my job, for the first time in my adult life, I had the freedom to work on growing my company the way I had always dreamed I would. I immediately took some of my business savings and rebranded my side hustle and turned it into my career. I finally built a new website and I was off and running…well, as off and running as a full-time work-at-home-mom can be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out and network as often as other founders and I wasn’t going to be putting in 60-hour weeks with a baby on my back. So I started growing my social media following as much as I could and really dug deep on my market research and brand story. I started sharing my experiences on Instagram and Facebook about what it was like to finally pursue my dreams while also learning how to be a mom. And it worked!
What are the three most important habits to be a successful entrepreneur?
The first habit for me is planning ahead. I have a bullet journal spread that I write out at the beginning of every week, without fail. On it, I have a spot for each day where I plug in my meetings and family commitments.
And then I separate my to-do lists into four categories:
Who do I need to contact?
What tasks do I need to accomplish?
What projects are we working on?
What is coming next week?
Having my lists broken apart like that makes it SO much easier to stay focused on what I need to do and where I can fit those things into my schedule for the week. And when I am in analysis paralysis, not knowing what to spend my time on, I glance at my lists and can be reminded right away what I need to be doing.
Secondly, I always stay focused on my mission as a company. If a new product or service we are thinking about creating doesn’t align with the overall mission, we don’t do it. Period.
Third, I make sure my staff knows that I not only trust and value them, but that I truly care about who they are. I could never have done this without my amazing team, and I do my best to make sure they know it.
If you had one piece of advice for someone just starting out, what would it be?
Ask for help, ask for help, ask for help, and then take it when it is offered.
How do you prioritize self-care and well-being while managing the demands of your business?
Performing is the thing that feeds my soul. It is my non-negotiable self-care. I need it, or I will get squirrelly AF. I asked a fellow poet, Sonya Renee Taylor, how she always seemed to have the energy to keep creating and making change in the world, and she said something that I think about all the time. “I only give from my overflow.” Performing music or poetry or doing public speaking not only fills my cup with all the things I want to be in there but it also dumps out all the stuff that I don’t want to be in there. It gives me a whole new cup to hold my overflow so I can keep going, giving, and changing the world daily.
What would you consider your biggest accomplishment and why?
In 2021, we got a contract to create half a million of our plantable seed bombs by hand in just two months! At the time, I only had 2 part-time employees who each worked 10 hours a week but I had to say yes. I just had to. I brought on a temporary team of 70 people and we worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week for 8 weeks, and delivered them…on time. Our seed bombs were included in the Lowe’s Spring Garden Giveaway event all across the US.
Shortly after that, I was selected to compete on Meet Your Makers Showdown, a crafting competition show on discovery+, hosted by Chrissy Metz and Leann Rimes, which was a really special thing to be a part of and the people I worked with will be my friends for life.
Immediately upon returning from Hollywood, SURPRISE! I got pregnant with my daughter.
Since then, life has been different for me. Going back to the slowdown of pregnancy and the newborn phase, when I didn’t think I would ever be doing that again, I really tried to cherish the time with my family instead of attempting to hustle my way through it like I had with my other two kids. I successfully took my first-ever paid maternity leave, from my own company, and my team ran the business without me for three entire months.
Success has always meant something different to me than it does to other people, but prior to having my daughter, I probably still would have said that completing that crazy job for Lowe’s or being featured on discovery+ would be my biggest accomplishments thus far. But being able to leave my business in the hands of people I have trained, and knowing it would still be thriving when I came back has been the ultimate in entrepreneurial success for me.
How do you set your business apart from others in your industry?
Over the years I have had MANY coaches, advisors and general commenters tell me that I should just pick one thing and only do that one thing. But I think our secret sauce in our business is that we don’t just do one thing–we’re like a one-stop shop and we can utilize all our skills, resources, and connections to create custom projects that any one company just can’t do. We say “Yes!” when they say “That’s not possible.”
Which female leader do you admire, and why?
Oprah, because she has built her entire career on bringing people together over information, literature, spirituality, and inspiration. As a kid in 5th grade in 1992, I wrote a report on her for African American History Month. Learning how she had been born into poverty to a single mother (like I had) and that she had been assaulted when she was young (like I had) made me feel a kinship with her right away. Learning that she had overcome all that hardship and had followed her dreams to have a career in television while she was still in high school was so inspiring to me. I had already been watching her show religiously after school, dreaming of having a career like that and I actually used to put together imaginary episodes of the show I would have someday.
Seeing her build herself an empire, totally focused on bringing joy and celebrating connection the way she wanted to, and watching her continue to use her platform to affect change in the world the way she has, continues to inspire me every day. I can’t wait to meet her and I know that someday I will.
Do you have a favorite quote or motto that inspires you?
Something my mom said to me on the first day of kindergarten when I told her it was boring, she said “Do it because you can, not because anyone is going to make you.”
I also really love, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other, as though everything is.” -Albert Einstein
My main goal in life is to effect positive change in the world. Discovering that sharing my own story about overcoming tragedy and failure would be the best vehicle to help me do that was the turning point for me. I learned very early on how a single positive experience can change your life forever and I set out to create those moments for other people and to do it as often and as intentionally as possible. I strive to change the way that people think about themselves, their world, and their place in it. I’ve learned that being vulnerable and genuine gives others the freedom to live that way too. In a song called Bohemian Audacity by my band, BloodThirsty Vegans, it says, “Be the change you wanna be by changing the way you see.” and I hope I’ve inspired you to see your own experiences differently too.
“You really only need five things to survive. You need food. You need water. You need shelter. You need someone that loves you and something that drives you. Everything else is just cake.” – Janna Willoughby-Lohr
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Melissa Stewart is the founder of SheOwnsIt.com. She is a Purveyor of Possibility, Entrepreneur Advocate and Coffee Addict. She believes that behind every successful woman is her story. What’s your story?
