Marguerite Cazeau
Founder, paper & print
Grew up outside Montreal, trained as a papermaker in Lyon. Runs the shop floor. Has the world's best opinions on envelope weight.
The studio
A small print shop on Commercial Street.
Four of us, one letterpress, a kettle that's always on. Around the corner from a fish market, one floor up from a lawyer who keeps complaining about our music.
Paper & Pine started in early 2023, in the back room of what used to be a photo-framing shop. Marguerite had just left her job as a papermaker for a stationery brand in Boston — she wanted to make something smaller, slower, less scaled. Theo had been training image models for a consumer-goods company and was tired of every project ending in a slide deck.
The first version was a bad Google Form. You emailed a photo, we painted it in watercolor over the weekend, mailed it back the next week, charged nine dollars. Thirty-two people tried it before we ran out of energy.
The idea stuck, though. A painted card instead of a photo-on-foil. Something between "I got it at the pharmacy" and "I hired an illustrator." Theo spent the summer of 2024 training a small model on a set of cards we bought by weight at estate sales — about forty thousand by the end, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Real patina. Real imperfection. Not the plastic look that every other generator produces.
By September we'd hired Iris (papermaking, printing, runs the shop when the rest of us are arguing about typefaces) and Nina (illustrator, model taste-tester, eats the cookies). The printed-and-shipped option went live in October 2024. We shipped eleven hundred cards that first December. Last December it was twenty-six thousand, and we had to bring in two seasonal folks to keep up.
That's the whole story. Nothing venture-funded. Nothing disruptive. A small building, a small team, a good cup of coffee, and one painting model trying to make your family photo look like something your great-grandmother might have sent.
Four of us, one dog.
Theo Vrancken
Founder, model & web
Belgian. Trained image models at a consumer-goods company in Brooklyn for four years. Builds the model, writes the code, makes the coffee when Iris is busy.
Iris Hamanishi
Printer & shop manager
Printmaker from Oahu, moved up to Maine for reasons she calls "climatic and romantic." Keeps the press running. Keeps us humble.
Nina Schäfer
Illustrator & taste-testing
Joined after graduating from MassArt. Draws the reference work we feed into the model. Also: owns the dog. His name is Moss.
26,214
Cards shipped in December 2025
~37s
Median time from upload to PDF
1
Letterpress, still running, since 1961
40k
Mid-century cards fed to the model
Visiting the studio.
The door is on Commercial Street, painted red. There's a brass card slot that still works — if you slip a note through, we'll read it that evening. No storefront, so it's appointment only if you want to come in.
That said: if you find us on a random afternoon and the door is open, the kettle is probably on. We like visitors.
Paper & Pine Studio LLC — 414 Commercial Street, Portland, Maine 04101