Our Story
Hello! Welcome to our little corner of the internet. I'm Louise, founder, illustrator and animal lover at Louise Mulgrew, a greetings card and stationery publisher based in beautiful Brighton, England.
My business journey began with my visit to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage in Nairobi whilst I was still at uni studying Illustration. I’d always been an animal lover and a crazy cat lady, but that trip was my inspiration to start painting animals for the very first time. For my Final Major Project of my degree I wrote and illustrated a picture book about an orphan elephant called Tibbo, and many years later, elephants are still my favourite animal to observe and paint.
After finishing uni in 2014, I moved back in with my parents and working from their spare room, I continued to grow my portfolio of animal illustrations which I sold at local markets and fairs. It took me a year or so after uni to start to develop my own style, and at Spring Fair in 2016 I showed my first collection of cards, Furry Friends, which is still my best selling collection seven years later.
I soon roped in my business-savvy, accountant-brained Dad, who was coming to the end of a contract at the time and was in the market for a part-time, low stress, project. For the next two years (working full-time and most weekends) Dad devoted his life to helping me build the solid foundations of our animal-loving, paper enterprise. Although Dad is now happily retired, our team has grown to include my Mum and several wonderful non-Mulgrews, all of whom keep our Operations running smoothly.
We supply around 500 independent shops in the UK and Ireland and our stockist list includes stores such as Harrods, Selfridges, Fenwick, Postmark, John Lewis, Waitrose, Waterstones and Barnes and Noble and Papersource in the US. Our little cards also travel across the world via our distributors in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
We’re really proud to have won a few prestigious industry awards in both the UK and US including Most Promising Young Designer in 2020, Best Art Range in 2017 and 2020, and Artist of the Year in 2023.
Our cards and paper products are all published locally in the UK, working with other UK-based small businesses as our suppliers and fulfilment partners and we are passionate about minimising our impact on the environment in every way that we can, constantly improving the materials and processes we use to create and send our products out into the world. All of our cards and products are now packaged plastic free!
It really is an absolute privilege to work alongside my fabulous team, without whom it would not be possible to see through this creative dream of mine and hopefully we create something that makes others happy in the process.
