This week, we are featuring a brand new business: Gentle & Ruthless Design Studio! Whatever your design needs (place settings, stickers, wedding invites, cards, etc), this design studio has you covered!
Gentle & Ruthless was started by Cheyenne Barton. Our Studio Manager, Taylor Juarez, went to college with Cheyenne, which is how we found out about this amazing new business! Cheyenne lived in Austin for four years and just recently moved to Seattle. Want to know more about how she started her fabulous business? Check out her story below!
"I’ve always been an actor, but I started getting more into design and illustration around my freshman year of college. I’ve been doodling on my class notes and in random notebooks and sketchbooks for as long as I can remember, but it was towards the end of my freshman year that I wanted to get better and improve in a really serious way. I started bullet journaling, and posted pictures of it to Tumblr, thinking nothing of it, but my bullet journal led me to a huge following on Tumblr, which then carried over onto Instagram, which then blossomed on YouTube. It was literally something I just sort of stumbled into. Suddenly people I didn’t even know were expressing great interest in my art and creations, and I started toying the idea of maybe one day opening a stationery shop. The idea quickly formed into a full-fledged dream of being self-employed—being my own boss meant that I would have the freedom to make art during the day and then turn around and go into rehearsals and auditions, all on my own schedule. It would be perfect. I kept sharing my bullet journal and bits and pieces of doodles and things for a couple years, always thinking of being a freelance designer and shop owner, but feeling like I didn’t quite have the talent or skills yet. I moved to Seattle, and I tried to stay creative, but my anxiety and depression took a really bad hold of me. Once I found out that my summer job was not going to keep me on for the winter, I realized I was going to be jobless in a few weeks time with literally no source of income, save for a few sparse acting gigs. I figured there was no better time to take the leap. I furiously finished my Squarespace site that had been sitting half-finished for months, took out a business loan to buy supplies, painted things and scanned them in to make prints, designed and printed out a ton of sticker sheets, and finally made everything live, announcing it across all my social media platforms. The response was more than I ever could have hoped for in a million years. Now, I’m literally living the dream life I’ve wanted for years: I get to make a living off my art."
