A young architect who wanted to be a painter met
an Australian school teacher with a penchant for
collecting things. They married and
traveled the world together, having 7 kids on 3
different continents. As age mellowed them, they settled
in the southwestern US and began designing for the
scrapbooking industry, drawing upon a lifetime of
traveling and experiences. They named the little
company in honor of their 7 beautiful children. Here's a
bit of their story:
To break with the past, we took the family on a
summer road trip through France,
Spain and Italy for a couple of months. As the
trip progressed, it became clear that what we would
really love to do was to take our style of
journaling and memory keeping
to the growing world of scrapbooking. We had a pretty
good idea of what the brand would look like since we had
been collecting and producing things for our family for
years.
But what to call our new, little
company?
We
had rented a large, one of a kind, white van (a Peugeot
Boxer) for our trip. It was a perfect size. One
beautiful day in the south of France, we were forced to
an abrupt stop when a procession of large, white vans
(just like ours) spilled out of a field onto the road in
front of us, bringing the holiday traffic in both
directions to a grinding halt. Being at the front of the
halted traffic in our big white van, we suddenly
realized that we looked like a part of the
traffic-stumping, white van group and that we seemed to
have the job of stopping the oncoming traffic and
allowing the cavalcade to turn lazily onto the highway.
“They’re
gypsies!... and everybody thinks we’re with them.”
“We’re gypsies... we’re seven
gypsies!”
(We have seven children but two of the kids had not been
able to make the trip so there were only seven of us in
the car at the time.)
So 7gypsies it is. Sometimes life is just
that simple.
Donna & Steve Smylie
This web
page design features 7gypsies products from the Paddington and
Conservatory Collections. Elements not displayed
to scale.
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UltraPro Corp. All rights reserved.
6049 Slauson Avenue, City of Commerce, CA 90040.
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We
had rented a large, one of a kind, white van (a Peugeot
Boxer) for our trip. It was a perfect size. One
beautiful day in the south of France, we were forced to
an abrupt stop when a procession of large, white vans
(just like ours) spilled out of a field onto the road in
front of us, bringing the holiday traffic in both
directions to a grinding halt. Being at the front of the
halted traffic in our big white van, we suddenly
realized that we looked like a part of the
traffic-stumping, white van group and that we seemed to
have the job of stopping the oncoming traffic and
allowing the cavalcade to turn lazily onto the highway.
“They’re
gypsies!... and everybody thinks we’re with them.”