Lindsay Griepenstroh prints puns onto greeting cards in her garage on a machine that weighs over a ton.
Griepenstroh is the owner of Truth Papers and uses a century-old antique letterpress. She brought a smaller version to her new pop-up shop inside of Union Bank & Trust’s downtown lobby. All of the stationery includes Griepenstroh’s designs.
“I have a background in graphic design and I’ve always just had an obsession with paper and greeting cards, stationery,” Griepenstrosh said. “Shopping for school was always my favorite time of the year.”
For the holiday season, Griepenstroh will be at Union Bank Place as a pop-up shop. The bank regularly hosts pop-ups at its large downtown branch to support some of their customers with small businesses. Griepenstroh sells greeting cards, stickers, notepads and prints.
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Truth Paper’s stationery is printed using a letterpress. During the process, ink is spread onto a plate using rollers before it is pressed onto a piece of paper in a pattern determined by a plastic stencil.
Griepenstroh’s designs include a description of the anatomy of a Nebraska football fan, puns and birthday cards featuring characters like snails and gnomes.
Printing was originally just a hobby for Griepenstroh, but during the pandemic she couldn’t do her normal job making handouts for a church.
“You couldn’t hand things out,” Griepenstroh said. “And so I pretty much didn’t work there. And so I took that opportunity to put a lot of time into Truth Papers and see what I could do with it.”
Truth Papers can be found at different craft shows, on Etsy and at the bank from 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday.
The bank has hosted several other companies through its pop-up program, which is open to small-business owners who are customers of the bank. Pop-up residents have the space for a four-month period, Union Bank Vice President of Small Business Stephanie Dinger said. The bank along with the graduates of the pop-up celebrated the one-year anniversary of the initiative in September, she said.
“So most banks highlight commercial customers that are large customers, but one of the pieces that we have really focused on is giving resources to the small businesses, or those starting,” Dinger said.
She said the pop-up is a competitive advantage for the bank and showcases what makes it different. Both a coffee shop and the pop-up space are in front of the bank’s tellers on the ground level of the downtown branch.
“We really are reinvesting back to our customers, and it’s fun for customers to come into this building and have a coffee shop, a place they can go buy something,” Dinger said. “This building is full of people who work here and it’s really neat for them.”
At first, Trust Papers’ stint in the pop-up location was delayed because Griepenstroh had jury duty, but now the business is fully set up and a good place to shop for unique holiday gifts, Dinger said.
“It’s true entrepreneurship, from the moment you started in your time, it’s been unique,” Dinger said of Griepenstroh. “You had jury duty and it’s just really cool to see entrepreneurship happening right inside our building.”
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