Kathleen Hopper Lives To Help Celebrate

Weddings and birthdays energize Kathleen Hopper.

As the owner of , a stationary store on Myrtle Avenue in , Hopper helps patrons design and personalize the tone of their celebrations.

In spite of difficult economic times, the shop is thriving. Stressing customization, the store invites customers to flip through catalogs of products and select the theme, style and wording of their purchases.

“Some things are completely custom and some things we order out of a book,” Hopper said. “We just sit down and create and look at samples and books and figure it out. We also offer the services of a really talented calligrapher.”

Hopper designs all of her shop’s unique window displays, which currently include a rotating birthday cake card sculpture topped by glittering candles, and a wedding dress and wedding cake made of invitations. The backbone of their business is the wedding season, she said.

”All year round we have a really busy wedding business,” she said. “There’s never a down time. In California it goes all year.”

In addition to weddings, Hopper has designed for numerous other occasions, such as birthdays, bachelorette parties, bridal showers, picnics, spa parties, home tours, movie nights, rehearsal dinners, girls night out, graduations, and other celebrations.

Hopper said she has worked with parties that are as large as 3,500 people, and with a variety of individuals and organizations, including USC, Huntington Hospital, and the local . They’ve also donated invitations and other products to local schools for events and raffles.

“The community supports us and we absolutely support the community back,” she said.

Hopper grew up in Arcadia and said that she first began working in a stationary store in San Marino.But after attending Parsons School of Design, where she received a B.A. in fine art, Hopper did not go into the stationary business.

Instead, she worked as a clothing designer for 10 years. After retiring from that career, she quickly decided that she wanted her next venture to be in Monrovia.

“I hadn’t a clue what I was doing,” she said. “One day I woke up and said, 'I’m going to open a stationary store in Monrovia.' Three months later I was open.”

“From the day it opened it was embraced, it really was,” she added.

Hopper said that her first shop was tiny, only about 480 square feet, and she mostly ran it by herself.

“I was so busy I couldn’t get to the phone! I remember one day, I literally missed 25 phone calls,” she said. 

She has since expanded the store to 1,600 square feet in her present location, and she’s been able to hire staff to help her.

“We didn’t have a hard start up. The hard part came with the recession,” she said. 

The most rewarding things about her business are the friendships she’s been able to develop with her customers, she said.

She’s even become a godparent because of a friend she originally met through the shop.

This story is part of Patch's nationwide series " Tell us what issues and what stories in Monrovia go to the heart of your American Dream. Please contact editor Nathan McIntire at nathan.mcintire@patch.com.