Our Story
Joone launched in June (naturally) of 2019 and was co-founded by Whitney Chiu and Lauren Venell.
Whitney and Lauren met in 2018 through a mutual friend, and quickly realized that they were working to solve the same problem from two different sides.
Whitney's attempts to make the inspirational projects she found on Pinterest and Etsy were often thwarted—instructions were vague, leading to lots of “Pinterest fails”, high quality materials were hard to find, and by the time she was ready to start the project she had lost motivation. The selection and retail experiences at the mass craft & hobby stores were wildly outdated and uninspiring.
As a professional artist and designer, Lauren found that only 5% of her time was being spent on creative work. The other 95% was spent running the rest of her business—marketing, sourcing, fulfillment, bookkeeping, and customer service. She longed for a revenue stream that would pay her to create inspiring projects, without piling on additional operations to support it.
Joone was created as the solution to both of these challenges.
In 2020, Lauren left Joone to start Maydel, a new craft company celebrating the best in craft. Whitney stayed with Joone and now operates the company out of San Francisco, California.
