Western States Envelopes is a large commercial distributor of envelopes and paper products, and mainly sold to Big Box Stores. They also had the facilities for commercial printing. After seeing the success of other online printer and envelopes providers, they decided to put their hat in the ring.

They didn't want to step on the toes of any of their current business partners, so they wanted to build a new brand from the ground up with a humanist and environmental message. Furthermore, they didn't have a distribution strategy. They were used to fulfilling orders of 500,000 products, not 50. Lastly, they didn't have any product photography, instead relying on technical illustrations which were mainly used in printing production.