Meet the artist

Karen Adams Designs

Karen Adams Designs works out of a former Memphis bakery, where RISD-trained Karen Adams draws cards that are printed locally and finished by hand.

Based: Memphis, Tennessee
Since: 1999
Craft: Hand-drawn, hand-finished paper goods

Karen Adams was born in Memphis and had lived in Tokyo, Omaha, Cincinnati and Houston by age seventeen. She studied apparel design at the Rhode Island School of Design and worked in New York fashion in the 1980s for brands including J.Crew. She moved back to Memphis in 1994. In 1999 she began designing custom invitations for nonprofit organizations out of her guesthouse, and those original drawings and hand-finished cards became the company.

Today the studio makes greeting cards, notepads, desktop items and gifts. Karen hand-draws her designs, then refines them in Photoshop. Everything is printed locally and hand-finished at headquarters in the Edge District: the former Camp Building, built in 1945 as a bakery, which shares a wall with Sam Phillips Recording Studio. It's a family business, with her husband Ed, daughter Wallis and son Avery, and they still have Sunday dinners together.

Her favorite compliment is hearing that one of her cards marked something special in someone's life. At ModernTribe you'll find her hand-glittered menorah and dreidel cards, in boxes of six.