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 How we got our name . . .

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