The longer story:

It all started 3 years ago with my love for flowers; I wanted a way for them to be everywhere. 

Frazier and I had been married for about a year and lived in my parent's basement. This is where the first Mayzie Co. product was born: the pressed flower iPhone case. I’ve always loved flowers [I mean, who doesn't.?], and I wanted them to be everywhere, hanging on my walls, on my kitchen table, anywhere and everywhere.

At the time, I worked at a local health food store and had a cute wooden name tag, I started using resin to put flowers on my name tag and thought, “I use my phone every single day, I’ll use the leftover resin and put flowers on my phone case; it might be cute” 

The next day, I posted my little iPhone case creation on my Instagram story, and to my surprise, a couple of people replied, saying they’d pay me to make them one! I kept posting about the new cases I’d make, and a couple of people would continue to ask for one. So, I started researching good-quality iPhone cases, where to source well-pressed flowers, how to perfect the resin process, etc. 

Long story short, I saw an opportunity and rolled with it! The pressed flower iPhone cases became the face of Mayzie Co.

As for the stamp cases, just a couple of months after I started Mayzie Co., Frazier and I decided on a last-minute anniversary trip to a favorite city of mine, Amsterdam.

Something about me is that I want to live a memorable life. I want to see the world and travel [as cliche as it may sound]. In 2019, a friend and I decided on a whim that we’d backpack Europe for a month. Was it conventional? No. Was it the best “financial” decision? To most, no. Would it be a memorable, life-enhancing experience? To us, yes.

From the day we bought tickets to the day we left, I worked every job I could to have money for our adventure. I got a job at a health food store, was a housekeeper at a Marriot, house-sat, baby-sat, sold things, etc.. I had no idea what to expect from this trip, but I felt it would be the trip of a lifetime. And it was. We backpacked to 7 different countries: hostels, sleeping on trains and train station floors, and sharing meals to save money. It was magical, truly a trip I’ll never forget. 

At this point in my life, I already knew I loved traveling, whether that was camping, taking a solo Greyhound bus trip to Oregon for 10 days, or backpacking Europe for a month. I loved it— the known, the unknown, the people, experiencing other cultures and environments, and most of all, creating a good story out of my life. I learned very quickly that prioritizing travel is important to me.

Now, coming back to the stamp case origin, Frazier and I decided to go to Amsterdam. It was a similar situation: Was it a good financial decision? Probably not. But we decided early on in our relationship that we wanted to travel. To us, it was worth it to be a bit frugal so that we could have the experiences that only traveling can give. 

This trip was incredible. Amsterdam was my favorite city when I backpacked, and at this point, Frazier had never been out of the country before. So, The Netherlands was his first experience, and it was dreamy. We loved it.

While in Amsterdam, we were wandering around a street market and I found a couple of containers full of postage stamps. I was instantly intrigued, I didn’t think twice about it, I bought all of them. I had no idea what I would do with them, but I made room in my suitcase and brought them all home.

As I said, I’ve always been a sentimental, traveling, life-loving girl, and these stamps were all those things to me. They are little pieces of art from all over the world that have traveled themselves on letters and postcards, some stamped back to the early 1920s. I loved looking through them and finding stamps from places I’ve been and places I want to go. Absolutely incredible. 

I held onto these stamps for a long time. As neat as they were, I had no idea what to do with them. One night, I was working on some floral iPhone cases and thought, “I wonder if I could incorporate these into the iPhone cases?” To be honest, I really doubted it, but I tried—I added the stamps onto the phone case with the resin, just like I did with the floral cases. It turned out cool, but not the quality I’d want in a product I sold. 

[another long story short] Over time, and after testing many different processes, I found a way to design the stamp cases in a way that preserves the stamps with the quality I wanted for my products. 

These stamp cases are so unique and quickly became my most recognizable product. Collecting these stamps and designing these pieces have been incredibly rewarding. 

At the end of the day, they’re just iPhone cases. But to me, they are something to have every day to remind you that you deserve flowers every day. They can also remind you of your favorite travels or inspire you to buy a plane ticket and see the Eiffel Tower sparkle at dusk (it sounds cliche, but it’s something to check off the bucket list) or to take a cable car through the Swiss Alps to your Mountain Hostel in Switzerland.

You deserve to live a good life and I hope these flowers and stamps inspire you.