Our story
Lady Falcon Travelers was originally named Morgan le Fae’s Trinkets and was born as a small bookmaking and trinkets shop in 2012. A creative outlet for an overworked IT engineer with a love for pen, paper, paint and an overwhelming need to build and create stuff.
Hi, my name is Monique and I’m this IT engineer gone AWOL to create and design awesome stuff. First just for friends and family. Later, after showing some of my work online, I was asked if I would make Traveler’s Notebooks for other people as well. This seemed like fun to me, so I did and I’ve been making Traveler’s Notebooks, inserts and accessories ever since.
The original shop name, “Morgan Le Fae’s Trinkets”, was derived from my daughters middle name, Morgan, as in Morgan Le Fae, from the legends of king Arthur. She used to me with making inserts from time to time, but since she now is in University, this doesn’t happen that often anymore.
I first started out with making Traveler’s Notebooks by request via Facebook, but that soon became too much to track. By the end of 2013 I turned to DaWanda for selling my Leather notebook covers, as I thought it would be a more European oriented market. However my Traveler’s Notebooks do their name credit by traveling all over the world. This prompted me to make the step to Etsy by halfway 2014, since this platform is more worldwide oriented.
With all this growth we needed a logo, so I designed a logo for the Etsy shop using a little pen nib as a starting point, a Lady Falcon. Which also happened to be my Instagram name. With the items in the shop being planner and journaling oriented, I felt that was appropriate. Especially since I use the Lady falcon dip pen regularly for writing in my art journals.
I developed the logo further by taking the starting letters of the shop name, MLFT and worked from there… Now the fun thing is, that the Lady Falcon, the little pen-nib can also be read with these letters, LFT.
WHERE ARE WE NOW
I also feel that the shop is a living growing thing and will change over time. I’m learning something new every day. Especially about how to run a shop. I’ve had to learn a lot about leather working in the past few years, but equally as much about running a shop. Bumping into all sorts of problems along the way. Learning to cope with growing demand and recognizing when it’s time to call in the troops for assistance.
Which sounds easier than it actually is, since leather working is not a skill that a lot of people have. Especially when you, like we do, work with traditional methods and do all the work by hand. So calling in the troops, sounds like it’ll help right away, but in actual fact it’ll slow you down at first, since those troops need to be trained. Skills that I accumulated over the course of a few years, now had to be taught to my trainees.
First in line was my husband Martijn, who was already helping with the shop and is now full time working on making your Lady Falcon Travelers.
In June 2016 Kitty joined the team as well and started learning the skills for Traditional leather working. She’s now part-time employed, making Lady Falcon Travelers and assisting me with developing our brand.
In December2016 we called in extra help from Annelinde and she’s now also helping us make your Leather notebooks for you.
WHY DO IT ALL BY HAND
Why do we choose to make our products by hand, using Traditional Leather working skills and techniques. With so many tools available today, like sewing machines and laser cutters, to make our life easier, we could get a lot more Lady Falcon Travelers out into the world in a much shorter time span. However, we feel that the quality difference and the result are worth the effort.
With most things these days being available off the shelf in this ever faster growing consumer world, we believe it’s worth to take time to stop and make a product from start to finish by hand. Devoting time and attention to each individual piece.
Instead of offering a select range of colors, which are easy to keep in stock, we choose to let you personalize your Notebook with a wide range of colors and techniques. This makes it harder for us to get each piece out the door, but we feel that this personal approach to every Lady falcon Traveler is what makes them what they are.
BEST THING
Someone asked me once what I felt was the most difficult thing about this job and to be honest, I feel, the most difficult thing about it, is making something I’m proud of and then letting it go, out into the world… I have gotten better at this, as more and more Traveler’s Notebooks hit the road.
I would like to add, that the best thing for me about this job is the response I get from customers. There is nothing better than a lovely review or a little message in my inbox with a few happy lines from somebody who received their notebook. This is what keeps me going!
xoxo Monique
Website: Lady Falcon Travelers
Etsy: Lady Falcon Travelers
Falcon Travelers 