Paper Rock Scissor: Invitations, with personal panache

You can get your wedding invitations adorned with the familiar array of bells and flowers just about anywhere.

But if you want to use a picture of Mabel, the family springer spaniel, with a "Just Married" sign hung around her neck, I've got just the place for you.

Paper Rock Scissor (PRS) is a south Minneapolis business started by Patty Zgonc (pronounced sconce) and Erica Marsden, a pair of creative young women who specialize in custom-designed invitations and announcements.

Mabel was the star of one of the more unusual designs the two have produced in the five years they've been in business. Zgonc, 32, and Marsden, 33, also have featured a grandma's sketches, a groom's golf clubs, a couple's favorite hockey team and another pair's beloved tandem bike.

Not to mention acres of up-north pine forest and lakeside scenery.

It all adds up to a business that's on track to gross upwards of $125,000 this year, which would be a welcome 30 percent gain over recession-strapped 2009.

Which is not bad considering that it's an appointment-only business model -- and half the partnership is down to 12 hours a week because of the birth of Marsden's second child in March.

Whereupon Marsden gave birth to her first child late that year. Then, in mid-2008, Zgonc left the business when her husband's job took them to Europe for a year.

If all goes well, Marsden will be back to a regular schedule in September. Meanwhile, the combination of absentee owners and encroaching recession trimmed the gross to a low of $96,000 in 2009.

Nonetheless, the partners are sticking with the appointment-only approach, which will allow Marsden to spend more time with her young children and gives Zgonc the flexibility to handle two other part-time jobs that help keep food on the table while they grow the business. She spends about 20 hours a week doing bookkeeping for a remodeling business and marketing for a Realtor.

Perhaps more important, it allows them to focus on the part of the business they enjoy the most -- the client contact and the creative process -- "and it makes our clients feel as though they're the only customers," Zgonc said. Besides, she added, "we had regular retail hours in the beginning, and it wasn't all that productive."

The preceding mention of hounds and hockey as elements of wedding invitation designs is not to suggest that the bells and flowers are absent. Indeed, Zgonc and Marsden offer their clients a choice of more than 200 designs and motifs they've developed, ranging from trees and vines to berries and snowflakes to swirling flourishes and scroll designs.

All of them can be printed on more than 200 types of paper -- matte, metallic, layered, patterned and, for the environmentally conscious, recycled -- in hundreds of different colors.

Paper Rock Scissor happened by accident. Zgonc, who started out as a grade-school teacher and spent two years as a program coordinator for a Minneapolis conference services business, was still searching for the right career fit when she met a woman in 2004 who sold personalized stationery and invitations and fell in love with the concept.

"I'd always wanted my own business," said Zgonc, who promptly started Ninth Street Stationery out of her downtown Minneapolis condominium.

Meanwhile, Marsden had worked in a retail stationery and invitations shop while attending college in San Diego. When she married in 2001, she designed her own wedding invitations, which occupied a sheer, opaque outer envelope with a rich purple ribbon wrapped around an inner envelope that had a shimmer of silver and gold on it.

"I loved the whole process, and it got a great reaction," Marsden said. "I thought, 'I can do that.'"

The two were introduced late in 2004, "and we clicked instantly," Marsden said.

It was a productive fit: Thanks to her earlier job experience, Zgonc had honed her planning and organization skills to help her handle PRS' business, promotional and client relations chores. And Marsden, despite her college major in sociology, had demonstrated her custom design chops.

"Actually, I started out to study art," Marsden said, "but I didn't think I could make a living at it."

She was right -- so far. But she and Zgonc figure to turn that around in the next year or so.