Deborah Hefter

Deborah Hefter is an irreverent three dimensional designer.  Deborah’s gregarious nature, sense of humor and lack of fear enabled her to grow a retail business into what was referred to by her customers as a designer’s playpen. With her sister Holly they were able to lay the foundation for what would evolve into the premiere product line and business for the creation of custom invitations called Envelopments.  She is finally married to her partner Mark and shares two beautiful daughters with him.

How did you get started in Design?
I think my life in the creative world started way back in first grade, when I ditched my assignment of copying what was written on the board into my composition book and went straight to the art project that was waiting for those who completed the task.  This behavior followed me through high school. I was the only girl in metal shop so I could learn how to weld. I was notoriously late to other classes if I was too involved with finishing a project in one of my art classes. By my senior year I was an independent art student and wrote my own curriculum for four consecutive classes in a row.  The Assistant Principal once stopped me in the hallway and said, “Ms. Hefter, you need to take a real class, because you will never make a living at art.”  Little did he know how much his words would stay with me; little did I know that I would grow up to prove him wrong.

Why did you start your retail store Elements?
My sister Holly and I actually thought we had escaped retail. After having grown up in retail drug stores and beauty supplies, we ditched our parents businesses and hit the road as sales reps.  We sold amazing elaborate handmade cards by functional artists way ahead of the public’s acceptance of the $4.00-$8.00 handmade greeting card. We courted LA’s finest retailers trying to get someone to open a store in Orange County where they would have no competition.  One day we decided to shut up, and do it ourselves.  In 1985 on a wing and a prayer, and with our parent’s house on the line, we opened Elements. The store reigned in Irvine for 20 years as a destination for cool gifts, great cards and incredible custom invitations and announcements.

What was your inspiration to get into invitation design?
Aside from the fact that if Elements failed we took down two generations with us…I backed into invitation design, quite literally.  In the early 1990’s retail slowed to a crawl so Holly and I scrambled to find something to keep the doors open.  Elements was filled with beautiful papers and envelopes so we thought maybe we would buy one of those idiot proof printing systems we saw at the tradeshow and personalize the papers for our customers.  Neither one of us knew what we were doing, so Holly said she would dig in to learn the tools.  She was the designer/printer and I ran the store.  We took in a few orders, made a few mistakes, and took in a few more orders. It grew slowly, then on a particularly bad day when a 300 piece order was jamming each time Holly sent it through, I took over the printing before she could throw the printer through the window. It was love at first jam I guess.  I seemed to have the patience to want to see the end result.  Then and there we switched roles in the business.

When you started doing custom invitations the state of the art was predefined wedding invitation albums.  How did you break through that mold?
Given my dimensional art background nothing I designed stayed flat for very long.  My third job in, someone asked if I could put an invitation on a wine bottle and away we went.  Each job gave me courage.  I never said no, even though I never knew exactly what I was doing.  Every time I took in a job I had to find my way.  There were no road maps and no safety net. Every day was trial by fire. I had created a niche for myself in doing those odd and off the beaten path invitations, not because I saw the opportunity in that, but because I had no background in any of it. I had never sent a printed invitation to anyone prior to doing this work so I didn’t really know what it was supposed to look like. This seemed to tickle my customers who brought me crazy projects. I was a quick study of people and could conceptualize their events into color, texture, type fonts, text and then produce it quickly.  We called it “design on demand.”  We laughed and had fun while we came up with the concept, then the customer would leave, go have dinner with their families and I would stay up all night pulling together just the right things while being mindful of their budgets.

How did you end up starting Envelopments?
We hung examples of all our finished work around the store. It became a big deal for our customers to be on display in our gallery. As my reputation grew, so did my level of stress.  I had an innate sense how to make things look good, but precision, like using a ruler, was not in my repertoire…not a good combo.   Enter Mark Smith, again actually. I met Mark five years earlier, just before opening the store through a mutual friend.  There was an immediate camaraderie. He was instrumental in getting Elements ready the month before we opened by designing our business identity and getting it all printed. Soon thereafter Mark flew to Europe to live the artist life between Germany and Spain for five years.  He managed to come home yearly to visit family and always checked in with us.  He would usually show up just as I had designed myself into a dark corner and aided me with a solution, a tool, a new process.  During one of his visits he found me hand cutting and scoring these four folded things which Holly eventually named Envelopments.  I had made some by hand for a customer because you couldn’t buy them anywhere. Each time I showed the sample the next customer wanted them.  My weekends became a fulltime production process of handwork.  Upon watching me waste another weekend hand cutting these Mark came back with die lines and our first product was ready to go.