The Art of Creative Collaboration

What We’ve Learned from 20 Years of Our Sister Creative Partnership

Amanda Marmer Photography

“You’re sisters and you work together? I could never work with my sister!”  Over the years, Eunice and I have heard this exclaimed more times than we can count, making us realize that 20-year creative collaborations like ours might be kinda rare.  Why is that, we wondered? What makes our creative partnership work?

Eunice and I are sisters, and started Hello!Lucky, our creative studio, in 2003.  Our collaboration has been through a lot of ups and downs – from greeting cards to wedding invitation e-commerce to publishing and licensing our creative work.  Now, we’re on rails, publishing four children’s books per year, and designing hundreds of other products that seek to bring joy, creativity, and connection to our customers, including greeting cards, onlines invitations, calendars, puzzles, and games.  We love working together!

There is definitely something magical about our partnership that I’m not sure can be easily replicated – our temperaments, talents, and shared experiences as sisters create a wonderful alchemy that simply clicks.  That said, we’ve also been intentional about cultivating a relationship that works creatively – our own Golden Bowl, if you will!

Here are seven things we’ve learned over our 20 years of experience creating together:

1. Build Trust.

Like any siblings, Eunice and I had our fair share of rivalry, including sneaky sabotage, hair-pulling and fist-fights (these dynamics proved to be excellent fodder for creating our graphic novel characters, flying squirrel and unicorn frenemies Astrid and Stella!).

Honestly, Eunice and I were not particularly close when we started Hello!Lucky.  Starting a business forced us to redefine our relationship on new terms outside our family of origin. Bootstrapping our way through the highs and lows brought us closer together (including hiring Eunice’s house cleaner as our first employee, driving to Reno in the middle of the night to deliver an order for Anthropologie, and having our trade show booth almost fall apart on a Martha Stewart editor!)  Through it all, we developed an unwavering trust in each other by investing consistently in our collaboration, appreciating each other, and working towards our shared goals selflessly with zero tit for tat. 

It all started when I decided to quit my day job as a consultant to help Eunice start Hello!Lucky.  I believed in her 1000% and was willing to jump on board to be her champion, doing whatever it took to get the business off the ground. My husband and I invested a significant portion of our savings, and Eunice, in turn, invested a huge share of sweat equity (admittedly, she was a bit of a people-pleasing workaholic back then!). 

To this mutual investment, we applied our shared work ethic (we both do what it takes to get the job done, and we love to overdeliver!). The result has been a shared track record of success that we can both proudly point to and say: “Wow! We did that!” The more we achieved, the more trust we built, creating a virtuous cycle.

2. Have a Shared Vision.

Over time, Eunice and I have arrived at a shared vision of creating products centered around Eunice’s art that bring joy, creativity, and connection to our customers. The mission has been important, as our least successful years creatively were when we were chasing profits and scale.

That led us to create a secondary shared vision: to run a small, sustainable business on our own terms – not to become a big company.  Our all-women company has no set working hours and we make ample time for vacations, self-care, and attending our children’s school events. We have a shared vision of work in which we have flexibility as long as the work gets done, and done well.  This shared vision which encompasses what we make, and how we make it has been key to our creative success.

3. Establish Clear Roles.

Early on, we had two other creative business partners, talented artists in their own right. But their styles were incompatible with Eunice’s, and it created conflict. We parted ways amicably and Eunice became chief illustrator and Creative Director, while I ran the business side. Eunice generously began inviting me to start collaborating with her, because she loves getting ideas and input for her work. I began to art direct and write greeting card captions, which I discovered I loved. This was the beginning of our creative collaboration.

Over time, we found trusted employees and contractors to handle many day-to-day business matters like marketing, project management, and accounting, and changed our business model from manufacturing to licensing so it was much less complex to manage. This freed me up to contribute more creatively. 

Eventually, I discovered that, after 15 years of writing greeting cards, I was a good writer. We began to write and illustrate children’s books together, fulfilling a childhood dream. I write, and Eunice illustrates. We eventually even hired an Art Director to help us manage our creative workflow and provide yet another creative perspective. Today, we publish four children’s books per year. Through it all, we’ve always retained clear roles.

4. Check Your Ego.

Eunice likes to joke that her kindred spirit is a Golden Retriever – she will happily do anything she’s asked.  You can imagine that this makes her super easy to collaborate with!  She is always open, swiftly incorporating feedback that might drag others down. 
While I’m not quite as footloose and fancy free as Eunice, I do also practice having no ego, which I cultivate through meditation and other healing practices. As a result, we approach our work with enthusiasm, open-mindedness, curiosity, and pragmatism. A creative product needs to be commercial, since commercialism is a form of meeting customers where they are. So always ask ourselves:  What does this work need? What will make children feel seen, inspired, delighted, and make them laugh out loud?  What colors will pop off the shelf? What will earn a place in the Target plan-o-gram?  The answers, not our egos, guide our creative process.

5. Balance Each Other.

Eunice will admit she is flexible to a fault. I tend to have stronger boundaries and be more Planny-McPlannersons. I love her, because her free-spirited attitude keeps me from digging in my heels or getting stuck.  On the flip side, my fierce pragmatism gives Eunice structure and a goal to work towards (without me, she claims she’d have a tiny Etsy shop selling her craft obsession of the moment, which while fabulous, would probably not be having the impact that Hello!Lucky does, having sold 1.4 million children’s books and counting!). 

Like many artists, Eunice finds it hard to sell herself. I, on the other hand, have no problem pitching her talent (my knack even got her wedding featured on the cover of Martha Stewart Weddings, for which we paid in nine months of hilarious and sometimes grueling craft nights with girlfriends!). We also both know that, as the adage goes, 90% of writing (and illustrating) is editing. We are each others’ editors. We value each others’ feedback. In all ways, we balance each other. 

6. Cultivate Your Creative Habit. 

Eunice and I are both committed / addicted to our respective individual creative practices, which we feed with a variety of creative pursuits. Eunice loves drawing, but she also roller skates, dances, paints, and makes her own clothes, all of which inspire her illustration.  I love writing, but I also read, sing in a band, meditate, write music, arrange flowers, host gatherings, and volunteer for a non-profit, all of which fuel my creative practice. Creativity breeds creativity -- one medium feeds the other. As we individually seek and find inspiration, we bring juicy fodder to our creative collaboration.

7. Enjoy Yourself!

Our company’s mission is to spread joy, creativity, and connection. To do this, we have to really enjoy each other, our creative work, our partners, and our customers.  A joyful process leads to a joyful product.  We love and respect the intimate relationship we have with children, parents, readers, and stationery-lovers. We love our work (We get to do this!? Dream job!). We keep it light: there is NO such thing as a stationery emergency! Creative flow is all about play – when you’re in the flow, you can scrap thousands of failed ideas (which we have done!) and revise hundreds of sketches (done that, too!) and still laugh about it and move on.  Enjoy being in flow and have fun!