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Doris Wai was helping her sister plan a wedding when they got to the least exciting part of the checklist: photo booth props. What was available on the market struck her as flimsy and a little tacky — not something her creative eye could accept.
Doris is a full-time hand-lettering artist in Toronto, Ontario, so she made her own. She kept the classic shapes — top hats, mustaches, bow ties — but redrew them with a modern, hand-lettered spin, cut from craft card paper and colored by hand. They were a hit at the wedding, and Doris realized they had a second life beyond photo booths: she started using them in place of greeting cards, writing her well-wishes on the back and letting the recipient use the prop for a selfie afterward.
She built her designs by hand — pencil sketches, photographed and cleaned up in Procreate, refined in Adobe Illustrator, then printed on craft card paper and colored one at a time. That let her test the idea in small batches instead of committing to a large print run. She named the business PoseCards and started selling on Etsy instead of building her own site first, both to reach a built-in craft-friendly audience and to avoid spending money before she knew the idea would work. She priced each card at $8, informed by what she knew traditional greeting cards cost.
Before she scaled up, Doris trademarked the idea — both the name and the design. She'd held off marketing PoseCards hard while she waited on the US trademark, since she already had the Canadian one. She first tried to file it herself: Canada has an online process, and she thought she'd been approved, only to later get a notice saying the office was confused about what the product was. By the time everything was resolved, the whole trademarking process had cost around $8,000. Her lesson, and mine: don't DIY a trademark. If it's worth protecting, hire a real trademark attorney.
With the trademark settled, Doris built out an actual website for PoseCards and put real focus behind growing it. She now has 200 designs, has sold more than 5,000 PoseCards, and has earned $30,000 from the business — with her props spotted at New York Fashion Week and NBA All-Star Games.
Find her full lineup at PoseCards.ca.
