The illustrations of St. Louis-based artist Mary Engelbreit have graced books, greeting cards, calendars, t-shirts, mugs and more since she first gained widespread popularity in the mid-1980s. Now, fans of Mary Engelbreit have the chance to decorate their homes with the artist’s hand-drawn patterns through a collaboration with female-owned St. Louis-based company Our Local Wallpaper Studio. Together, the companies have launched the first designs in the debut Mary Engelbreit line of peel-and-stick wallpaper, with plans to add more in the future. We spoke to Engelbreit and Taylor Smith, founder/owner of Our Local Wallpaper, as well as lead of operations Casey Housman about bringing the line to market.
How did your two organizations come together?
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TS: Mary found us through Instagram and [her team] reached out to us. We received an email about collaborating, and we knew who Mary was. One of the things we had been working on this year was partnering with local artists, but none as big as Mary, so when they reached out we were pretty excited.
ME: We have been looking for someone to produce wallpaper for a little while. I didn’t know [Our Local Wallpaper] was here in town. We had a meeting and showed them a bunch of our stuff, and they were very agreeable and wanted to do what we wanted to do, so that was exciting. It came together very fast, in just a few months.
Describe the new line. How many patterns are there?
CH: We wanted to stick with five to start, and then we decided we would offer those five in a second color. So each design has two color options for 10 total designs. We kind of had to pick the iconic cherry design, so that is one of them.
ME: I specially designed some of them and some of them I had. We had been working on patterns for a while. I do that in between my big projects.
What was the collaboration process like?
TS: One thing we really like to do is let the artist do what their creative outlet was meant to do. They sent over some images that they thought would be good and we picked a few that we thought would go well with our branding, then they came back with some different ones. We printed out samples of the ones they picked and we made adjustments to coloring and sizing. From that point, there were just a few minor tweaks.
ME: This was fun. They are so easy to work with and very helpful. They kind of had the same vision we had for what it should look like. I have over 14,000 pieces of art, so we knew there would be something there they could use. We just took what they liked and built on that.
Do you see this as a long-term partnership?
ME: The idea is that there will be a lot more. We’re going to do children’s wallpaper and maybe some companion pieces to the ones that we just put out, and maybe even some borders, like checks or really simple lines and things.
TS: We have talked about expanding on some other stuff Mary has to offer. When we visited her office, she had this really pretty alphabet, and with our product it’s not just wallpaper. It can also be spot decals, like flowers or the alphabet, that could be used in a playroom or teachers could put them in their classrooms, so the options are really endless.
What were the challenges and/or rewards of working on this project?
CH: With Mary’s illustrations, she hand draws them, so there is the challenge of getting that into a pattern. It’s not digitized. We have to turn it into a digital file and then print it, so it’s amazing we can do that.
ME: People are pretty excited about it and we feel like we’re producing something our customers have wanted for a while.
Do your companies often do collaborations? What are some of the others you have done?
ME: We have always done licensing in the old traditional way where you sign an agreement with a company and they produce product for a limited time. But since the pandemic, this collaboration thing has really grown and I really like working this way because everyone is interested in the end product and it happens faster. We have tiles coming [with LiLi Cement Tiles] and we just did some paint by number sets and are also working on a fabric program.
TS: We collaborated with a local blogger, Arin Solange – she was our first one. She sent us some designs she liked and then we had our local graphic designer create them. We also worked with artist Chloe McKenzie [of Hello Chlo], who has three different prints she made for us.
