This hand-painted card set contains six unique cards with matching envelopes. The cards are blank inside. Each card is hand-painted on large pieces of card stock before being foil stamped on one of our antique foil presses, resulting in an entirely one-of-a-kind card. This card uses our brush-painted process.
Card size: 5.5 x 4.25" / 140 x 108 mm folded card
Made in the USA in Des Moines, Iowa
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MOGLEA BRAND: Chad and Meg Gleason met at Iowa State University while pursuing careers in furniture and graphic design, respectively. They fell in love and were married before their last year of college. They spent countless hours scheming about the possibility of working together someday. Sadly, the Great Recession had other plans (the year was 2008).
Instead of moving to NYC after graduation, they took the more promising opportunity to join Chad’s family’s farm business in Chad’s hometown—Audubon, Iowa. Chad worked with his father and brother on their grain and livestock farm, while Meg started a letterpress stationery business called Moglea in the basement of their farmhouse.
The Moglea name was created during a very memorable car trip around Lake Michigan in 2009. The name is a mix of the GLEA from the Gleasons' last name and the M from Meg’s name. Initially, the name represented the letterpress stationery business, but Meg wanted the name to be very non-specific, making sure that the brand could incorporate any design object that the Gleasons created under the Moglea umbrella.
2012 Meg exhibited the first Moglea stationery line at the National Stationery Show. Meg sought to bring paper goods to the wholesale market, which used unique production processes that she hadn’t seen other lines using.
That first line used hand-applied paper collage, brightly colored hand-painted neon edges on super thick card stock, and cards dipped in Kool-Aid and natural dyes. The line was so successful that Moglea needed a larger studio outside the home.
Chad designed and helped build the first Moglea studio on the same property as their farmhouse in 2015. The studio was built adjacent to a river and was designed with stilts to avoid any possible flooding.
Chad’s passion for designing furniture was reignited through the studio's design. He eventually exited the farm business to help design and direct Moglea in 2016. They aimed to create a line of furniture and other home goods under the Moglea name.
It is challenging for a design business to keep staff in a small town, so the Gleasons moved Moglea to the much larger city of Des Moines in 2018. Located at the west end of downtown Des Moines, the DSM studio contains all of Moglea's operations: design studio, wood prototype shop, pressroom, production studio, and fulfillment. Chad and Meg are still the creative directors of the line.
Moglea's artful stationery is created using hand-applied production processes to add unique elements to each product. The production team thoughtfully applies layers of paint to extra thick sheets of paper before cutting them down, yielding unique compositions. Each piece is finished on one of their antique presses, where it is foil stamped, printed, or die cut using traditional letterpress printing processes.
The Moglea line is a joyful exploration of composition, pattern and color. For each new release, Chad and Meg intentionally focus on adding unexpected production processes or visual ideas to the current collection. The result is a product line in which each piece feels like a work of art that is meant to be shared.