Life is a Journey…
“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
We’ve learned a lot about travel, business, finances, and how to work together - all while treasuring the in-betweens, the growth, the questions, and the uncertainty of entrepreneurship. We wouldn’t trade it for the world, and we’re here to share some of it with you.
Forrest Gump Was Right.
“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
This is my first ever blog post. It’s been on my bucket list for a handful of years, and I realize I’m late to the party. After all, the word blog conjures up images of the late ‘90s where the Internet was still a burgeoning term to the masses and social media didn’t even exist. I wanted to wait until I was an expert at something - because why else would someone write a blog? What I’ve realized since then? We’re always learning, always evolving, always changing. Expertise is also really hard to quantify. At some point as the years go on, it’s time to stop and admit we’ve learned a few things along the way. As Emerson put it, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”
So here it is. A brief synopsis of Journey Print Shop, and the couple behind it.
John and I met in the winter of 2016, in Grand Rapids, MI. I was working in government purchasing, and he was an engineer. We had no idea what our future held, but for the most part, he assumed he’d always work as an engineer and I’d continue some type of administrative career. We were married two years later, in 2018, and settled down in the Lake Michigan town of Holland, MI. Something we’ve been passionate about from the beginning is financial freedom and living debt-free (more on this later). During our first year of marriage, we dabbled in a couple of side hustles while we worked full-time, as more of a hobby than anything else. One of those hobbies eventually became Journey Print Shop, which we officially opened in January of 2019. By November of that year, I left my corporate job to work on our growing business full time. We all know what happened in 2020, so I’ll pause there for a brief moment only to say that John followed me in May of 2020 to self-employment, and we’ve been stay-at-home, married business partners ever since.
So much has changed since we started this business on a clunky old Macbook in the corner of our apartment kitchen. We’ve learned a lot about travel, business, finances, and how to work together - all while treasuring the in-betweens, the growth, the questions, and the uncertainty of entrepreneurship. We wouldn’t trade it for the world, and we’re here to share some of it with you.
Stay tuned.
Cheers,
John & Rachel