Cheryl Bochner and Wendy Laven met when their 3-year-old sons were in preschool together. They joined forces to start Invitations and More, a stationery business, and will celebrate 15 years in business this fall.

Was this business something you dreamed up together? Whose idea was it?

Wendy: I was pregnant at the time so I was looking for birth announcements. I went to a store at the time and thought, I could do this better. I’m from Detroit and I knew someone who had done this. I was a dental hygienist in Detroit and I’m not licensed out here. I would have to go back to school [to practice here] and I was pregnant and had a 3-year-old, so I was not going back to school. So, I met [Cheryl] and I thought, okay, she looks nice, I think we should do this.

Cheryl: I was a buyer in retail before we did this, then I had my older son and I stopped retail. My mom did this a little bit on a very small scale when I was in high school. She just had two companies she had books for. So, we went to New York the first year to the stationery show and just bought the books that we liked and got started. We started out with six books and now we have about 160.

Do your customers come to your home?

Cheryl: Yes, they call us, make an appointment...and we also have a website and they can just shop right off the website.

So, what do you do?

Cheryl: Our primary business is wedding and bar mitzvah invitations but we also do birth announcements, moving cards, sympathy cards, stationery…

Wendy: Save-the-date cards…

Cheryl: Holiday cards, stationery for adults and children and lots of fun pads and paper gifts.

Wendy: Personalized plates and dishes, kids dishes…

Cheryl: Almost anything personalized.

How do you make working from home work around your kids and family?

Cheryl: We try to see clients during the day but we do take afternoon and evening and weekend appointments. We make ourselves available for our clients and juggle.

Wendy: When [the kids] were younger, we’d make arrangements with the husbands to take the kids but now our kids can drive, so if need be, they can drive the younger one. But sometimes we still have to be at their weekend activities so sometimes it’s still a question of time. There’s never enough of it so we just try to work around everybody’s schedules.

Cheryl: But that’s the beauty of working at home is you can work your own schedule.

What is your biggest challenge as work-at-home moms?

Wendy: Just trying to be there for the kids…

Cheryl: Balancing our schedules. My kids both play sports. One plays baseball, like, five days a week and one plays tennis five days a week. And her daughter dances a bazillion hours a week. Just trying to be at their games and getting them where they need to go and being at their activities.

Wendy: And not just being there for their activities but being there for them emotionally and having the time for them when they want to talk and deal with certain issues. You don’t want to say, well, the phones always ringing and it’s a customer calling and you have to be accessible because you’re working out of your house. Sometimes they can only call after they put their kids to sleep and that’s usually when my kids can talk so sometimes it’s hard.

Cheryl: But I think we balance each other, I’m a night person and she’s a morning person, so I can stay up and she can cover the morning.

I would say that this year’s been the most challenging because we’re both getting ready to send our older ones off to college and just trying to do that whole college process has been tremendous. The biggest time issues we’ve had have been this year.

Interesting… more than those early years?

Wendy: We don’t remember the early years. [laughing]

Cheryl: Our kids were busy then but they were busy at home. Now they’re more busy outside the home. If I had a little helper, you know, a sitter or someone in the house, they could play with them while we saw clients.

Wendy: It wasn’t as stressful then because you didn’t have to be somewhere.

Cheryl: We didn’t live on a time clock quite as much.

Hmmm… this is good information.

Cheryl: Yeah!

Wendy: Yeah, it is good for you.

Cheryl: Everyone says, oh, it’ll get easier. Well, I think it gets tougher. The time part is tougher. I don’t think you can realize when the kids are little how busy they can be when they get older.

Wendy: And how much we have invested in them to be successful. You know, nowadays kids can go any direction. You want to get home and be at home when the kids get home from school and know what they are doing. With all of the texting and Facebook and everything you don’t know what your kids are doing.

Cheryl: So we feel lucky that we can be at home.

Is it hard working with a partner?

Wendy: It’s great!

Cheryl: It is because we can bounce ideas off each other… complain to each other. We can share the workload, like when one of us is out of town. Usually, we don’t travel together except for that once a year when we go to the national stationery show. And we’re in two different locations so that provides more accessibility for customers because she’s out east and I’m more north.

How has your business changed over the course of time?

Cheryl: Well, we used to have a lot more contact with people having babies, the younger moms, and then we transitioned to tweens, teens…

Wendy: And now we’re doing bar mitzvah invitations for kids we did birth announcements for…

Cheryl: And we’re doing and wedding invitations for kids we did bar mitzvah invitations for. And I think it’s more service oriented now than ever before. People really want to see that personal interaction. That’s our biggest sell, is our personalized service. 

Wendy: And our attention to detail.

Cheryl: People can order on the website but more often than not we find that people still want to sit down, look at the actual paper and feel it.

Wendy: And over the years our customers feel like family. We’ve watched their kids grow up, they’ve watched our kids grow up and it’s really nice when you see them 10 years later [and they say], "I remember when your kids were 5 years old! I can’t believe they’re going to college..." you know, it’s really nice.

Cheryl: I have someone’s wedding I’m doing, I met her when she was 12½, I did her bat mitzvah invitations, she became my babysitter for five years, she went off to college and now she’s getting married this August and I’m doing her wedding invitations… they just came in.

So what would you tell a pair of young moms who just met at preschool and want to go into business together?

Wendy: Take a chance. It never hurts to try and you never know where it will take you. I don’t know if we thought this would be this successful for this long. We just sort of jumped in and did it and went for it.

Cheryl: Be organized. And I would say, network. It’s important to network.

Wendy: We’ve worked primarily by word of mouth over the years.

Cheryl: We’ve done a little bit of advertising but mostly word of mouth. And we do shows. We do two shows a year, an open house at our house before the holidays where we send out six or seven hundred invitations and we just plan it with a few other vendors and we just ave the open house hours for four days; two days at her house and one or two nights at my house. And the door’s open. People can come and go when they want.

We set up our house like a little store, we have all our samples out on tables all over. And then even if they don’t need anything, we hope that people come and see what we have that’s new. And we do a wedding and bar mitzvah show every September at the JCC and we’re looking at doing some wedding shows down at the civic center this year.

Wendy: And we go to New York every May to the national stationery show.

Now I want to open up a stationery store.

Wendy: It’s fun! You’re dealing with fun things with people…

Cheryl: Sweet 16, their birthdays, weddings…

Wendy: And we offer fun gifts. Who doesn’t like fun stationery?

For more information about Invitations and More, contact Cheryl at 480-998-8694 or Wendy at 480-860-6242 or email them at cheryl@invitationsandmoreaz.com or wendy@invitationsandmoreaz.com. Learn more at invitationsandmoreaz.com.