Paper and Spice | Small Business
small business in the making:
paper and spice
Mihaela Hinayon has quite literally come a long way in just two short years - she’s moved from the Philippines to the U.S., gotten married, and gone from being a communications project manager at Pfizer in Hong Kong to an aspiring small business woman in Providence. But in the midst of all that change, there lies a common thread: the need to follow her passions and add a little spice to life. And she’s bringing those qualities together in her new business, Paper and Spice. Hinayon moved to the U.S. in March, 2011 to be with her fiancé, a Rhode Island native whom she met in a Hong Kong Pfizer management training program. Like most brides-to-be, she threw herself into planning every detail of the big day, and in the process discovered what would soon become not only her next obsession, but her new profession – designing and printing letterpress cards and prints.
How One Young Woman is Turning a Hobby into a Business That’s Hot Off the Press
“I was looking online for wedding invitations and saw an ad from AS220 for a letterpress class. I checked it out, and it turned out the class was the very next day and there was only one spot left,” she says. “It seemed like it was meant to be, so I signed up.”
by Laura Dunn
By the end of the four-session program Hinayon says she was hooked. “I had been inspired by so many other people in the class. I decided to make my own wedding invitations on the press and I was really happy with them.” And her small business venture was born. Now, about a year later, Hinayon is working hard to build her business, while also working as a managing editor for RI Style magazine. “I’m surrounded by pretty things,” she says. In addition to all the “pretty things” she encounters through her job, her background in designing creative marketing pieces for Pfizer as well as a brief stint running her own communications design business, DesignNine Media, has helped in giving her an artist’s eye. But turning out work on a manual printing press is a far cry from designing on a computer. For Hinayon, it’s a labor of love. “Letterpress printing and design is really a lot of work. Everything is manual, you have to apply each ink separately, so if you have a five-color design you have to run each piece 5 times, and it takes a half-hour to clean the press after each ink. But it’s got so much more dimension than designing on the computer; it’s about craftsmanship and it’s something that I really love to do.”
Laura Dunn Quill and Cursor
Hinayon’s Paper and Spice creations can be found at Psuedio Studio, a gallery in North Kingstown. Her new holiday collection was also featured in AS220’s Annual Holiday Sale in early December. But the holiday cards and her other timeless pieces can also be viewed and purchased anytime in her etsy store at paperandspice.com. www.risbj.com | volume one issue nine
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