The Story Behind Little Joys
I've been thinking a lot about how Little Joys came to be now that we're getting so close to actually opening the doors. Opening a children's boutique wasn't necessarily something I had mapped out for myself years ago, but creating a space where I could build things and dream up different worlds absolutely was. I think I've wanted that for most of my life; I just didn't know what it would eventually look like.
Growing up, I could spend hours looking through House & Home magazines and imagining spaces. I've always loved interiors, colour, design and the way you can take an ordinary room and make it feel completely different. Even now, if you give me an empty space, my brain immediately starts figuring out what I could do with it. I love dreaming up worlds and then figuring out how to make them real.
I actually became a graphic designer before I became a photographer. I worked on logos, websites and social media marketing, and a lot of my early work was with nonprofits and community organizations. I was involved with Rotary and really loved being able to use my creative skills to help organizations tell their stories. Photography came alongside that. If I was building a website or creating social media content, having a camera gave me another way to create what was needed. I also worked in the Okanagan wine industry and started photographing wine, products and events.
Photography slowly became the thing that brought a lot of my interests together. It wasn't just about taking a picture. I could think about the colours, the styling, the location and the feeling I wanted, create it and then photograph it. I don't think I understood at the beginning that this was where all of these different skills were going to meet. I was just doing things I enjoyed and figuring it out as I went.
Then in 2021 the Lytton fire happened and my Nana lost her home. I wanted to do something to help her, and photography was something I had that I could give, so I started offering family photography sessions by donation to raise money for her. I wasn't trying to become a family photographer and there wasn't some bigger business plan behind it. I was just trying to help my Nana.
But people started booking, and then they kept booking. Family photography took off in a way I really hadn't expected. Eventually I was building full seasonal sets in my front yard with Bella Vita Flowers and photographing more than 100 families through the fall and winter seasons. For a few months of the year our front yard basically became a photography studio. I would come up with an idea, find furniture and props, choose the colours, work with the flowers and figure out how to turn a completely ordinary part of our yard into whatever I had pictured in my head.
I loved photographing the families, but I also loved everything that went into creating the space around them. I could spend forever thinking about what I wanted to build and then watching something that had only existed in my imagination slowly start to look real. Once the families arrived, suddenly there were kids running around and people laughing inside this little world I had created.
Looking back, I can see so much of Little Joys in those years. I didn't have a studio, so I figured out how to create one in my front yard. The kid who used to spend hours looking through House & Home magazines dreaming about rooms had basically grown up and started building them outside her house.
My Nana loved seeing all the children and families who were suddenly showing up in my work. She would tell me that seeing the children brought her so many “little joys.” Before she died, she told me she hoped I would continue on, and those words have always stayed with me.
My own kids were growing up right alongside the business too. There has never really been a clean separation between motherhood and my work. My kids have modelled for me, tested sets, come along while I've worked and grown up around cameras, backdrops, editing and whatever random piece of furniture I've brought home because I could picture it in a photograph. I've also homeschooled while building my business, so working with kids around has pretty much always been part of my life.
One of the crazier examples of that happened in the fall of 2023. I was hiking Giant's Head with my two boys and my youngest was on my back when I fell. I made an unfortunate twist trying not to land on him and ended up with a fracture and full dislocation of my ankle. It also happened right before one of the busiest photography seasons of my year.
You would think that might have been the year I decided to simplify my Christmas set. Apparently not. 😂
I had decided I wanted to build an eight-foot-tall wreath in the front yard, so somehow I continued with the plan. At one point the entire wreath came crashing down on me and my neighbours all came to the rescue and helped me figure out proper supports so we could actually keep the thing standing.
Somehow it all came together, and I went on to photograph more than 100 sessions that winter with my leg in a cast, scooting myself around the front yard to get where I needed to be. Then I'd go back inside and edit while I was still breastfeeding my youngest.
When I think about that winter now, I'm really not sure how I did it. I also probably wouldn't recommend it. But it is a pretty accurate picture of what building my business while raising my kids has actually looked like. It hasn't happened in a beautiful commercial studio with everything perfectly set up and a team of people making my ideas happen. A lot of the time it has been me figuring out how to make something work with whatever I had, with my kids around me and, occasionally, my neighbours coming over to stop a giant Christmas wreath from taking me out.
Breaking my ankle ended up changing things for me in another way too. During my recovery I started thinking a lot more about movement and eventually learned more about barefoot and minimal footwear. I changed what I was wearing myself and started paying more attention to what I was putting on my kids' feet too. It became part of a bigger shift in how I shopped for our family. I wanted things that were comfortable, useful, well made and actually worked for the way we lived.
As my photography business continued to grow, I also started moving back toward commercial work. In a lot of ways it brought me back to where I started with graphic design, marketing, products and businesses, except now I also had years of experience photographing families and working with kids.
When I saw the opportunity to work with Little & Lively, it felt like the perfect fit. They weren't a children's brand I'd just discovered. One of my longest-standing family photography clients did affiliate marketing with them, so their clothing had been showing up in my galleries for years. So many of the families I photographed wore Little & Lively, and my own kids did too.
When the opportunity came up, I went back through my old galleries and realized I had hundreds of photographs featuring Little & Lively clothing from long before I ever worked for the company. I thought that was so cool. I'd already been photographing their clothing on real families for years without intentionally setting out to photograph the brand.
Now I create commercial campaigns for Little & Lively, and it's become one of my favourite parts of what I do because it lets me bring together so many things I've learned over the years. I'm thinking about the photography, but I'm also thinking like a designer and marketer. I'm thinking about the collection as a whole, the colours, models, locations and styling, how the clothing moves, what they need for their website and social media and how all of the images will work together when the collection actually launches.
Really, I'm still doing the same thing I've always loved doing. I'm dreaming up a world and then figuring out how to make it real. Sometimes that's an eight-foot Christmas wreath in my front yard. Sometimes it's a creek or a bedroom for a children's clothing campaign. Sometimes it's a winery, a product setup or a completely blank room. The subject changes, but the part I love hasn't really changed.
And now Little & Lively will be one of the main brands we carry at Little Joys, which feels pretty full circle.
That relationship also helped shape the way I started thinking about the boutique. I knew I didn't want to open a children's store and just fill it with random things because I could get wholesale accounts. I wanted it to feel curated and I wanted to bring in things I genuinely liked and would use myself. A lot of the brands we're bringing in were already part of our lives before Little Joys existed. My kids have been wearing Stonz since 2019. They've worn Nooks. Little & Lively has been appearing in my family galleries for years.
We're also putting a big focus on Canadian brands and makers. There are so many amazing Canadian companies making thoughtful things for kids, and I'd love Little Joys to be somewhere people can discover them. I don't want the store to have everything. I'd rather have a smaller selection of things we genuinely love and be able to tell someone why we chose them.
Somewhere along the way, this idea also became something Alison and I started talking about seriously. The name Little Joys and where it came from are very personal to me, but the boutique we're opening now is something we're building together. Alison and I have really different strengths, which I think is actually good for the business. My brain naturally goes to photography, branding, marketing, the website, how the space looks and all of the creative things I want to do with it. Alison comes from an accounting and business background and brings a different perspective.
Eventually we stopped just talking about it and started looking at actual commercial spaces. Then we found the space on Front Street and suddenly we were putting down a deposit, signing a lease, figuring out insurance, contacting brands and ordering inventory. It went from being an idea to oh my gosh, we're actually doing this pretty quickly.
The studio is probably the part of Little Joys that feels the most like a dream I've had for a really long time. Not necessarily this exact storefront or even this exact business, but having a space where I can walk in, dream something up and actually build it.
For years I've done that wherever I could. I've transformed my front yard, rearranged rooms in my house, hung backdrops wherever they'd fit and built sets knowing I'd have to take everything apart again when I was finished. I've learned how much you can create with a small amount of space when you really want to make an idea work.
Now I finally get to have a place for it.
I don't really think of sets as just backgrounds for photographs. I like creating a whole feeling around something. I want to build a fall world and then completely change it for Christmas. I want to create spaces for commercial campaigns that don't always look like they were photographed in the same studio. I want kids to walk into something I've imagined and feel like they're actually part of it.
Photography gave all of those things I've loved since I was little somewhere to come together. Design, interiors, colour, styling, storytelling, marketing and photography don't feel like separate things to me anymore. Little Joys gives me a physical place where I can use all of them.
I love that the boutique can be part of that creative process too. I don't just want to sell products from Canadian brands; I want to create with those brands. Something could arrive from a Canadian maker, hang in the boutique and then end up in front of my camera as part of a campaign created in the same building. We're also right along the main path of the Penticton Farmers' Market, and eventually we'd love to invite makers into the store for pop-ups or takeovers during the summer.
I want kids to actually feel like they belong there too. We're planning a play area and creative things for them to do because I know exactly what it's like trying to shop with children. I don't want to create a children's boutique where parents spend the whole visit telling their kids not to touch anything. My own kids will be there sometimes too. I'm still homeschooling, I'm still running my photography business and I'm still a mom. I'm sure some days will be a little chaotic, but kids have always been part of how I've worked, so it wouldn't really feel like my space if they weren't part of this too.
I'm also not going to pretend that opening a store isn't scary. We've signed a commercial lease and we're spending thousands of dollars on inventory before we've even opened the doors. There have definitely been moments where I've wondered what on earth we're doing. I'm incredibly excited about it, but I think it's completely possible to be excited about something and nervous about it at the same time.
I turned 40 this year too, and I think that's part of why this feels like such a significant new chapter. My 30s were full of babies, breastfeeding, homeschooling, building a business, working from home, learning new skills because I needed them and changing directions as I figured out what kind of work I actually wanted to be doing. I've also gotten much better at realizing that I don't need to turn every skill I have into a service I sell.
I've recently stopped taking on new graphic design and website clients. I'm not quitting design. I was a designer before I was a photographer and I don't think that part of me is ever going away. I'm just using those skills differently now. I designed Little Joys, built the website and created the branding. I'm working on the store, planning the studio, dreaming up the sets and I'll be creating campaigns inside it. For the first time, all these different things I've done over the years have somewhere to exist together.
And somehow, after all of that, it still comes back to my Nana.
Little Joys started with her. She lost her home in the Lytton fire and I wanted to help, so I offered family photography sessions. Those sessions unexpectedly grew into years of photographing families and children, eventually to the point where I was building huge seasonal sets in my front yard and photographing more than 100 sessions during my busiest seasons.
My Nana loved watching that part of my business grow. Seeing the children in my photographs brought her so many “little joys,” and before she died she told me she hoped I would continue on.
I don't think the Lytton fire happened for a reason, and I would never want to turn something that devastating into a pretty origin story. My Nana losing her home was awful. But I can look back and recognize that something I chose to do in response to it changed the direction of my life. I picked up my camera because I wanted to help someone I loved, and I had absolutely no idea where it would take me.
Years later, I'm creating commercial campaigns for a Canadian children's company whose clothes had already been appearing in my photographs for years. My own kids have grown up alongside my business. I'm bringing brands into the boutique that we've actually worn and loved ourselves. Alison and I are getting ready to open a children's boutique and studio in downtown Penticton, and the little girl who spent hours flipping through House & Home and dreaming about spaces finally has a space of her own where she can build whatever world she dreams up next.
There was never a master plan connecting all of this. It happened one little piece at a time, and I think that's part of why the name feels so right.
I wish my Nana could walk through the doors when we open. I think she'd love seeing the kids coming in, the things we're carrying, the photographs being created and whatever crazy world I've decided to build in the studio that month. I think she'd also get a kick out of knowing that those two little words she used all those years ago somehow ended up becoming the name above the door.
She told me she hoped I would continue on, and I did.
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