Turning a Simple Hobby Into a Global Community with Jordan Truster and Jillian Reece

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Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. Today I'm joined by Jordan Truster and her twin sister, Jillian Reese, the co-founders of Lovely Loops. They've taught calligraphy to more than 60,000 students around the world, built one of the most active online communities on Skool, have a huge email list, and co-authored the book Lettering for Planners. And they did it with backgrounds in engineering and data analysis, not art school. We're gonna talk today about how to turn a skill into a community-driven education business, why owning your audience matters more than ever, and why a relaxing hobby may be one of the best things a busy entrepreneur can add to their week. Fair warning, you may wanna grab a pen before this one is over. And, uh, Jordan and Jillian, let me just share that as As soon as I was starting to prep again this morning for our interview today, I immediately thought of my daughter. She just started university. She is a science major, but she loves art and she loves calligraphy and writing and coming up with just being really creative. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to like look up all of your stuff, send it to her in Canada as soon as we are off the show.

Thank you for thinking of her. Yeah, that's, it's so fun to be able to share calligraphy and beautiful writing with other people who have an interest in it. Yeah, it's something that we love to do.

So talk about the scene, right? Set that scene for us. You signed up for your first calligraphy class at age 11 on a family vacation.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

So it's kind of the quick story is like you just said, we took our first class as kids. We were always into art. And just loved, like, we were the, the students that were writing pretty notes throughout our school years. And then fast forward to when we were adults and we both got engaged for our own weddings, we got back into calligraphy. So Jillian actually took another class to get back into it, and we were doing this together as a hobby. So we were at the time living in different states and, um, we started a shared Instagram account where we were posting our calligraphy as we were learning and practicing.

So this was back in 2015, was it?

Or 20—

yeah. 2015. Yeah. Then that turned into people asking us, how are you doing that? So we started a YouTube channel where we started our first tutorials. Then we taught in-person workshops and then eventually turned our in-person workshop into an online course. And over the last decade or so, we've, we have created online courses and then turned it into an online community and a membership and have taught, like you said, over 60,000 students around the world.

That's truly amazing. So you both went into analytical careers, right? Engineering and data science.

Yes.

You got pulled back into calligraphy through your own weddings. And I, I love this because it's always the best business case, right? That bit, that accidental business almost. You're solving something for yourself and other people are like, hey, I want that too. So can you think about a turning point where you realize that your analytical way of teaching worked better than traditional, just be artistic? What was the moment you knew that you were really onto something?

Yeah, so we've never really thought of ourselves as artistic people, and what we've kind of noticed over the years of teaching in our step-by-step way, which we just kind of naturally teach step by step, again, based on our analytical backgrounds, is that people really loved it. It made our teaching style, made it way more approachable for people who maybe don't consider themselves artistic or creative either, and they look at something like calligraphy that looks so beautiful and is— looks artistic. But the way that we break it down— one of our very first online courses that we ever made, I think it was in 2018 or 2019— no, the, uh, I think it was 2018— was called Letter Logic, and it was breaking down. So like, I kind of had this moment where I was trying to show some of our students different ways of writing the lowercase S in calligraphy. So I just like wrote down as many ways as I could think of, and then I started noticing like, oh, well, there's— you could either do the entrance stroke like this and the exit stroke like this. And I started to put it into a matrix for myself and then realized like, oh wait, I could do this for all the letters. And that became a course called Letter Logic, which logic is not usually something you would think of when it comes to calligraphy, but people loved it. And so we've kind of used a logical approach like that in all of our courses that we've taught.

Yeah, I was gonna say the— that's like the number one feedback that we get from our students is people saying to us like, I love how you broke this down and made it super approachable and step by step. And I think one of my favorite quotes of all time is, to teach is to learn. And so we were creating our courses as we were learning this skill ourselves. The way that we learned it was just, we were kind of self-taught and studied it. So as we were doing our own studies and our own practice, we then turned that into teaching materials because teaching something really solidifies it and helps you learn it and understand it better. And it, it actually kind of started by teaching each other.

Mm-hmm.

Like I discovered a certain technique. And so I was practicing it and then teaching it to Gillian over FaceTime. Like I mentioned before, we lived in different states at the time, and vice versa. And we've, we also kind of both developed our own styles in calligraphy, which our students also enjoy learning a variety of techniques. And so because there are 2 of us, that, that is also to our benefit.

Yeah, absolutely. Talk about how, you know, you went from in-person workshops into deciding we can actually expand this into a bigger business if we expand online?

We created a Facebook group after we were teaching our in-person workshops as a way to stay connected with our students. And again, this was back in like 2016 before it was like part of a business strategy to do that. We just did it to keep in contact with our students and we started noticing that people then were connecting with each other. So we did. In our Facebook group, we would add more lessons and we would teach live videos. And so that's when we realized, oh, we could also teach this online and reach way more people than just the people in our hometown or wherever we were doing a workshop.

And a real light bulb moment for us was when we realized that on Etsy, because we had an Etsy shop selling like custom calligraphy work and cards, then we realized you could sell digital downloads on Etsy. So we took the workbook that we had created for our in-person workshops and uploaded it as a PDF to Etsy that people could then purchase as a digital download, which was just such an unlock because then anyone in the world could buy it without us having to travel to them. And so that was, those 2 things then kind of came together. We, we actually then took an online course about how to make an online course and created our first online course in 2017, kind of combining all of these pieces. Of taking our materials, taking the best of what we learned from teaching in-person workshops. We did like 12 in-person workshops over a few months and took all those learnings, took our materials, filmed the video portion of it, and put it into an online course. And it was such a big success from the very first one that we created that we wanted to keep going.

Yeah. And that was actually my next question is, what are the things that you learned in person that you then were able to transfer? So I love that you had the foresight and the thought to, oh, let's film what we're doing in person and let's see what's really hitting over the course of these 12 workshops that would translate really well to online.

Yeah. Yeah. And we also were able to pick up other tips by teaching students in real life that we wouldn't have gotten if we just only started online. For example, left-handed students. So we are both right-handed, but we have a lot of left-handed students. So being able to observe what lefties were doing differently and give them specific tips and guidance was really helpful.

It was also helpful to kind of talk to people about why they wanted to learn calligraphy, because it's easier to do that when you're in person than trying to send people forms and surveys to fill out. Just to be able to interact with people and see like who's signing up for the workshops was really helpful.

I'm curious, obviously twins, co-founders, how has that shaped the experience? Because that's a very unique experience in the business world. Yeah.

Um, it's been a lot of fun. It's also been very I don't think I would, I definitely would not have started a business on my own. And just like having each other has been like vital to the success of our business to keep going. And over the course of our business, we also have both had kids. And so like we've, that's made our business possible to have 2 of us.

Yeah. And we both love, like in our, in our off time, we're always talking about like about the business because we love it so much and we read lots of books and discuss what we want or listen to podcasts and talk about the podcast with each other. So, um, yeah, I definitely agree. I don't think I would continue for so long if it was just me, but having, having a business partner who also can read your mind is, is pretty nice.

Were there ever any doubts, any hard moments when you said, do we really want to give up our careers and what we're doing and make this happen and make this work? Was there ever that moment?

I think there were definitely a lot of doubts, but also I think the timing of when we started this. At the time, we were— I was going— so we were going through life transitions like getting engaged and moving and changing jobs. And so it kind of aligned with some of those moments where we had to make the decision like, will I continue down this career path or do could we give this a try? And so we, we had been doing it for about at least a year and a half, just as like a side hobby, doing calligraphy and teaching calligraphy before we even thought to make it like a full-time business. So after about a year and a half and after our first course launch, we kind of made the decision to keep going with it.

And we kind of gave ourselves a deadline too of, okay, let's give ourselves like maybe 6 months, see what we can do in that amount of time. We know we can always go back to find To, to get a real job. Like I was in, uh, she was mechanical engineering. I studied marketing and then the job that I was in was more of an— a data analyst role, which I loved. And I feel like we both brought lots of what we enjoyed about our jobs into our business.

Like I, I still love Excel spreadsheets and, um, so, and we both just like love learning and like problem solving and thinking analytically.

Mm-hmm.

So like when you're teaching, a creative skill like calligraphy, but you're also running a business, you have to have both of those skill sets. And for us, we just, we love figuring things out, we love learning, and so we've learned over the years how to also run a business just by doing it.

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Can we walk us through That business moment of going, okay, we have this Facebook group, now we're going to move to Skool and then expanding into other platforms as well. What were the decision points in each of those? Because I know that's something a lot of people who are, who have digital courses are struggling with, right? Which platform is the best platform? Where is my audience really going to be?

Yeah, we've tried a lot of platforms and just because we've been doing this for so long, there have been new things that always come out and we're always Looking and seeing what would be the best tool for us, but also for the, from the student perspective.

Mm-hmm.

So we originally, when we started launching our courses, we used Teachable. We still use Teachable. And then our first membership that we created, we used Circle as our platform, and that was like the first community platform. And the reason we did that is because we wanted our students to be able to connect with each other that were in our paid membership. So like off of the Facebook group, we also at the time kind of had people that were interested in getting off of Facebook because of, because they didn't like seeing ads and stuff like that, which we totally understood. So that's why we started using a dedicated community platform. And then we've also used Skool for another one of our communities, just like to, again, to try another tool. And it's very different from Circle.

So yeah, pretty much everything we do, it's like we hear about a tool and we kind of wanna try it out as an experiment to see See like what it's like for us from the educator's perspective, but also the student perspective. And, um, yeah, so when we started our school community, it was, that was like a new offer that we were doing that was a little different from our older offers. It was more for beginners and a little more of a, an approachable modern calligraphy style. And yeah, we've, we've enjoyed using the different platforms and seeing how, how there's like a different feel in different communities. Based on what platform you're using.

Well, and keeping track of the communities, making sure people are aware of them, and then engaging. That's all a lot of work on top of creating books, courses, right? Figuring out what else your audience wants. So can you talk a little bit about that perspective and, you know, how you've cascaded your business?

Yeah, so we, we do spend a lot of time creating like the educational material, and then in our community, we go, we do a lot of like Live sessions where we're either doing like a Zoom call to connect with other members or teaching a new project or something. And then luckily we have an amazing community of members that are, we have a lot of retired women and those are some of our most lovely students and members because they are doing calligraphy as a way to just like kind of slow down and do something enjoyable in their free time. And they're very active in our community as well, which is amazing. Mm-hmm.

So, and some of them have been with us. Really since the beginning, like some of the, some of the names in there we can, we remember from our very first online course or they've been with us over the years and they've seen the journey of our personal lives of like having kids and being with us on the journey. Like we, we are so appreciative of everyone who's been with us for so long in our communities and helping keep it the positive, encouraging place that it is. So we, we never have a problem with having to moderate the community or—

Yeah, there's no, yeah, people are in our community are so lovely and beautiful. And we never, I know in some other online businesses, a community almost feels like a forced thing that you have to, but for us, we've never had that experience. We're so lucky to have—

Or yeah, or some communities almost feel like everyone's just trying to promote themselves or try to connect with people for reasons other than what the purpose of the community is. So we feel very fortunate that the type of people who are in our In our community are just the most amazing kind of people.

It's really unheard of. I mean, to be able to build such a great community where by example, right? But also just kind of maybe by innate expectation, you know, that the people who are going to be coming in are going to be a certain kind of person who's there to flex their own creative freedom, to, as you said, slow down, to learn a new skill, maybe use a different part of their brain. But they're not there for any other intentions. And I think that does happen a lot in other communities, or even I've been on Zoom calls where it's a lot of people meeting each other and everybody has an affiliate program and they're all trying to sell it to each other. And it's like, well, if you, you know, it can get—

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it can get really conflated when you're like, okay, everybody here is trying to sell something. So we're all cross-selling to our audiences. What's that actually gonna do for our audience? You know, in terms of how they're going to feel about us and continuing to keep that trust with our audiences.

Yeah. Yeah.

And also like, because our business is like a B2C rather than a B2B, it's different in as, as far as our audience, but also in terms of like how we market our business. And because I didn't study business, I have had to learn a lot about business and marketing just by doing it. And so sometimes I'll read a book or I'll come across like a a template for a sales page that's very like, what problem are people struggling with? What are their pain points? And with calligraphy, it's not really like a problem that you have to solve. It's just something that you do because it's enjoyable. And so, um, it's really hard actually listening to business advice from people that have a completely different type of business, like a B2B or something that's not like a creative hobby like we have been doing and, and helping our students with. So that's been a big learning for us throughout this journey as well.

I'm sure. And of course you have, you know, you started out the in-person workshops, moved to online, have a few different communities, different offers across different platforms. You also have a book. What was the genesis for that as the next gift you wanted to give to the world?

So the book, yeah, we had someone reach out. We had the publisher reach out to us.

Nice.

I think they saw our YouTube channel probably and asked if we would be open to writing a book. And this was, this was A long time ago. This was what, 2017 or 2018?

Yeah.

2018 is maybe when we worked on it. And yeah, we always like, we're always trying to share what we know with as many people as possible.

And so a book is just another format that we could do that, um, and get something physical and tangible into people's hands because everything else that we do is digital, which has its own benefits because we're always adding more lessons and uploading worksheets for people to download. So There's kind of, it was, yeah, it was definitely a different experience writing a book that we couldn't then edit after it was printed like we sometimes do in our courses.

Yeah. And what was that process like from beginning to end? How long did it take? Did you each tackle different aspects of it or did you just work on each part together?

We definitely worked on most of it together and, um, I think we just kind of went chapter by chapter.

And because it is calligraphy, it's so visual, we had It's not just like writing a book, like writing, typing. It's like we had to actually create a lot of images for it. And so we just, we had the outline, we went chapter by chapter. It was pretty straightforward. I feel like we had a really good idea of what we wanted it to look like. I think if we were to write a book today, it would probably look a lot different. But when we did it, it was, yeah, it was just a really fun project to work on together. And I think that, yeah, we had like—

deadlines and milestones from the publisher that we had to meet on certain days, which was very motivating for us.

Yeah. It strikes me that in this age where so much is digital, right? And AI, of course, is the thing everybody's talking about. You have created something and you have a love for something that AI can't take away.

I think that is something that so important for people these days. Yeah, we're working on a course right now that is about beautiful handwriting. It's a little more of a broad topic than calligraphy. It's top of funnel, if you will. And it's a little more broad than— because we're hearing people say, ever since I started using the computer and voice-to-text, my handwriting has gone downhill. And people have said to us, beautiful handwriting used to be part of my identity. People used to know me for my beautiful handwriting, and now I never write anything anymore, and now I just scribble and it looks bad, and people want to get back into, into this. And we always, like, over the years, whenever we would tell people what we do, people would say like, oh, calligraphy, that's such a lost art. And now we're kind of trying to embrace that of like, yeah, it kind of is. Like, people don't know how to write beautifully anymore, and people want that. Analog hobbies are coming back in general.

Mm-hmm.

And also slowing down. This is something that we talk about all the time, and with our students we talk about this too, and the purpose of writing and writing something down, like, and the speed of communication. Like, if you just think about the history of handwriting, people used to write by hand, and then typewriters were invented, and like the printing press, and so it became less important. And then of course typing on a computer, and now voice-to-text. So if you wanted to get an idea across quickly or just like catch a thought or write an email, use voice to text. But if you, if you are trying to create something like a birthday card for a family member or something like journaling and doing something for the sake of doing it and for just for the beauty of it, like having a beautiful moment in your day, putting pen to paper, then it is, it's worth slowing down for, even if like you could scribble a note Just slowing down and doing something intentional has a beautiful result, but then also a beautiful process and how you feel when you're doing it. Um, that's, that's another topic that we, we think about often is like getting into a flow state. And when you are doing calligraphy, a lot of our students describe it as something that's meditative and zen, and they use it as almost like their moment of mindfulness.

Yeah, one of— I just have a quote that I was just looking at. One of our students said, I enjoyed slowing down and focusing on this sheet of paper. I completely blanked out what was going on around me, at least for these 20 minutes. It's very relaxing. So I think there is something to be said for having— being able to like block out the noise of the world around you, whether that's AI or something else. A lot of people come to us when they have like a hard moment in life and they're trying to cope with grief or loneliness, or they're a caregiver and they want something for themselves that's relaxing. And so we just see so So many benefits of slowing down and doing something by hand.

Instagram Teen accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them, plus time management tools. And Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about Teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online Online checkout shouldn't feel like an obstacle course.

Card hunting, password fumbling— that's why there's Link. Link autofills your information and protects eligible purchases. Next time you pay online, look for the green button. Link, the smarter way to pay.

Something amazing is happening in data management. Even though storage needs are constantly changing, Companies are only paying for what they need now. That's because CDW customized an EverPure Evergreen One SLA-driven storage-as-a-service solution, delivering hybrid cloud storage that's easy to manage, efficient, and continuously evergreen. Simplify storage administration with EverPure and CDW. Make amazing happen. Find out more at cdw.com/everpure.

I'm Livvy Dunne, All-American gymnast and Vuori athlete. When you travel and train as much as I do, you find happiness where you are. On the mat or on the sand, movement and comfort are essential. That's why I live in Performance Joggers by Vuori, made from DreamKnit fabric that's made of 89% recycled materials, effortlessly soft and made to move as much as I do. My happiness starts It starts here in the softest joggers on the planet. Get 20% off your first purchase at vuori.com/livy. That's vuori.com/livy. Exclusions apply. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on US orders over $75 and free returns. Go to vuori.com/livy and discover the full versatility of Vuori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

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Yeah, I'm old enough to have learned cursive in school, which I know is something that not a lot of schools do anymore, but I never thought about calligraphy as putting you into that zen zone state of mind. That's really, really beautiful.

We have students that say like, I've tried meditating, but it was too hard because I can't just sit there and think about nothing, which But then when they try calligraphy, it does have like that meditative quality to it.

Is there something that you see successful creator educators do differently that you think other people who try to do this skip?

That's a really good, great question. And I think that if we even think about like our creator educator business from how we started to how we do it now, it used to be like when you would create a course, it was, here's the number of worksheet pages that you get. Here's the number of video lessons and the hours, and here is like, you're gonna be able to do this perfect skill. And now instead of—

Well, and then it was almost like an afterthought of like having a reason for someone to wanna buy it.

Yeah.

And now we try really hard to think about, and what I think other successful creators do is think about the experience of the student. And for example, for us, we've noticed that having accountability built in is really important for our students to succeed. Like someone just told us, like, sure, I could have printed out this alphabet on my own and, and tried it on my own, but would I have done it? Probably not. I needed this format of like, right now we're doing a 30-day course where each day there's one short lesson, one short worksheet for them to do. So thinking about the student experience is really important.

And also like we used to just try to cram as much information as possible into our courses and make it like as valuable as possible. But sometimes that's overwhelming. And I think that like in general, if I were to say, like, to simplify rather than to add complexity has been our goal and to make things as easy as possible for someone to actually do the thing, because it is hard to schedule time outta your day, even if it's just 15 minutes to like learn a skill or practice something.

Yeah, I think we used to want to like prove how much we knew by showing everything we knew in the course, and now we're leaning into like just in time learning of not sharing so much. And then one other thing I wanna say too is that we try to be very true to ourselves and not, not try to be entertainers. Like, I know there are people on YouTube who, who are very entertaining when they're teaching, and I guess that's one way to do it. But for us, it's like we don't really think of ourselves as entertaining. We try to just focus on like the student experience and—

Well, and when we started this in 2017, was our first online course. The word, I don't even know if the word creator was a thing yet. I don't think influencer was a thing that you used. And so I think that someone approaching this like that would be new, would probably have a totally different like expectation of what they're supposed to do and like create endless content and be entertaining and all these things. And we try to focus on being helpful.

Yeah. Nice. So really knowing your differentiation and what you can offer. I love the fact that you said don't try to prove your worth in so many words, right? You don't have to show all of the things that you know in one place, because I do think that's something where people get stuck. I know I've been stuck in that moment of like, well, how much information should I provide, you know, on podcasting? And how much is too much? And am I making sure that I'm giving them the right things and enough value? And, uh, we can get stuck in that loop. Instead of just taking a step back and saying, wait, what do people really need in this moment? So that's a really beautiful framing. Thank you for sharing that. What do you think online communities are going to look like in online courses in the next few years? Have you seen any changes?

I think some of them are probably gonna get really bad with AI swap and bots and everything like that.

And just trying to automate everything in the community, which kind of like defeats the purpose of connecting with real people, but I am hopeful that people will find the ones that they connect with.

And like having an online community is hard because, because it is online. And so you're not interacting with people in real life.

That's why we, yeah, that's why we try to do Zoom calls so that our members can really connect with each other and actually talk to each other. I do think that like we've talked about, maybe we could try to do some kind of in-person event where people can actually get together.

Mm-hmm.

And I do think that's probably gonna end up being like, just from trends I'm seeing in the online community space is Trying to do more in real life events where people can actually see each other and get in the same room. Mm-hmm. Although I know events are hard to, hard to pull off.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, I think that like going back to AI, I think some communities will use AI in a way that's helpful for their members. And going back to like thinking about the member experience of what would actually be helpful for someone in what they're trying to accomplish or the transformation we're trying to help them achieve, or just like the reason for being there.

Mm-hmm.

But just like using it mindfully and not just using it for the sake of being more efficient.

Yeah.

Yeah. Good distinction there too. I want to go back to the community that you've built over email as well, because you have a list that most people would dream of, right? How do you stay engaged with your email subscribers without over-inundating them? Because I know I'm on a lot of lists. I love the people that I get things from, but sometimes they'll send me something every day, every couple days when they're trying to promote an offer and I just have to go, I love you, but I'm unsubscribing. So how do you walk that line of making sure you're serving your audience, that you're, you know, able to keep them and keep their trust?

Yeah, so definitely whenever we are doing a promotional campaign, we build in opt-out links. Like if you're not interested in this particular course, click here and we'll stop sending you email reminders about it. So that's specific to like if we're doing something live. So every single month for the past, since 2020, we send, uh, just one monthly newsletter on the first of the month that kind of recaps the past month. And we try to include personal life updates as well to keep connected with our audience.

And then, and any other like new content that we've created, like a new tutorial or new blog post or anything that would be helpful or seasonal.

So like, Mm-hmm.

In the fall, we have a fall-themed workbook that we would share in that email.

And then throughout the month we share helpful— so we kind of think of it as like 2 different types of emails that we send, either something that's like a helpful resource, like a blog post that's a new blog post or revisiting a really helpful popular old blog post, something like that to give value. We recently just sent an email that was like fascinating facts about cursive, and I just like went down this whole rabbit hole and did a ton of research and sent people all these interesting facts, like Or like, why is uppercase called uppercase? Because like they used to store letters in cases and the case that was higher up, the uppercase had the capital letters and the lower. So stuff like that where it's just stuff that we're genuinely interested in. And like so many people replied to that email saying how fascinating it was. So I think we really try to think about what it's like to receive the email and not just send something for the sake of trying to get someone to buy something. And we've had people on our list.

Yeah.

For since we started it that like still stay in contact. They reply, like we try really hard to respond to as many emails as we can when people reply to us, not for a like business strategy, but just to stay connected with people.

I think it also helps that we, we have just the first of the month email. That's our newsletter. And then otherwise we just send either something that's interesting to us or something that's relevant. And we don't like force ourselves to send like an email every single day or like Tip Tuesday, like just—

Yeah.

coming up with a tip for the sake of it, which is nice when there is a cadence, but also sometimes I feel like there are definitely months where we only send one email and then there are other months where we might send 10 emails. We also have, so we offer a lot of free resources on our website and on our YouTube channel. So we have a variety of topics that we teach and like a free PDF or something for each topic.

Mm-hmm.

So we have people joining our list all the time just from our organic content and on the backend when they receive a worksheet about a specific topic, we have a follow-up sequence that usually lasts maybe a couple days. So right when they join our list, they'll get relevant emails about the thing that they specifically signed up for before they start getting like all of our other things. So I think that's helpful too, to keep the topic focused.

And then we have millions of tags inside it with, in our, uh, just to like make sure that we're sending people what they want and not sending them things that they don't want.

Fridge.

Have your children found an affinity for calligraphy?

Yes.

So I, uh, I have 4 daughters. My oldest is in 2nd grade, and she has 2 daughters. And yeah, they love seeing what, what we're doing. Like they always try to, try to make their writing look fancy.

They'll trace worksheets. My oldest is in kindergarten and she, she sees me creating worksheets. I actually have one right here that I can hold up if anyone's watching the video. version of this. It's just like one letter and it's broken down and then you practice it. And she saw me doing that and then next thing I know, she created her own calligraphy worksheet where she wrote the letters in her name. And I was like, wow, how— I guess kids are watching us all the time.

Oh my gosh, that is so sweet. That is so lovely. Um, I imagine that someday they're gonna wanna follow in your footsteps, run your businesses.

I hope so. That'd be fun.

If there's one thing that people could take away from our conversation today, Jillian and Jordan, what would each of you say?

So I think if you are someone that's a business owner, one theme that I just noticed that we kept talking about was thinking about your member experience or your student experience or customer or client, whatever word you use to describe the people that you're serving, and always thinking about from their perspective of like, okay, what am I, what is this person trying to achieve? What am I trying to help them with? And how can I make it as easy as possible for them? And like part of that too is listening to, to their feedback.

Mm-hmm.

We mentioned we collect student feedback all the time from forms and testimonials and just seeing what our people are saying in our community to understand what's resonating or what they're struggling with or Kind of using that feedback to help improve our offers and improve like everything that we do and everything that we put out there. So that would be my, the takeaway if from that perspective.

Mm-hmm. And then I think just in general is leaning into your strengths and your curiosities and not trying to do something because like there have been so many things that we could do with our business that like we know Sure, we could try to put together a high-ticket mastermind, but that doesn't really sound like something that we would truly enjoy doing. But what we do enjoy doing is breaking down letters, using our analytical backgrounds and being true to ourselves and our strengths and leaning into those. And not only does that make business and marketing more enjoyable, but I think it also has led to our success and our students' success. So that's what I would say.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. And do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, a family motto, words that you use as kind of your guiding star?

Oh, well, one quote that comes to mind just from what we've been doing recently with our students and encouraging them to slow down, and especially for slowing down for beautiful handwriting, there's a Gandhi quote that says, there is more to life than increasing its speed, which is just, I think, very relevant today. Like we, we were just discussing AI and how you can use it to make everything faster and more efficient, but like, should you?

Yeah.

And along the way, like if you're just trying to get through everything faster and faster, then like, what are you even— What's the point?

Yeah.

What are you even doing? So I've been thinking about that quote a lot.

And then one that I always come back to because I think it's so true in calligraphy And in our business and just life in general is Van Gogh's quote is, great things are done by a series of small things brought together. I think that's a great reminder to focus on the small things that you can do to bring, to then create something great.

Yeah, those are both excellent. I just wanna thank you so much, Jordan and Jillian. This conversation was a great reminder to all of us that the best businesses start with something we love and grow because we've real communities around it. We're going to have lovelyloops.com, of course, in the show notes where people can sign up for your newsletter, learn calligraphy with some of your free resources, and see what you're offering at this moment in time. So for everybody who's listening, if this episode sparked an idea in you, share it with a friend who has a skill in the world that we should all be learning from, and keep amplifying your own brand. And your own zones of genius. So thank you again so much. This was really fun. You two are both really lovely. I'm— I can see why you've had so much success with all of the positivity and the great things you're putting out into the world. And you are giving us something that we need, a chance to slow down, a chance to be creative and use our brains outside of being online in the digital space in terms of, you know, AI and everything else that comes with that.

Thank you so much for having us. This was great.

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