BHS Alum Lea Sellas Delaveris Develops Work-at-Home Career in Stationery Design
By Julie Perine on November 01, 2015 via Connect-Bridgeport.com
While attending Bridgeport High School in the late 1990s, Lea Sellas Delaveris was pretty involved in layout and design of the Ki-Cu-Wa. In fact, the work she did with her yearbook team and sponsor Mrs. Alice Rowe inspired her life’s profession.
“It finally occurred to me that it could be a career and I found the perfect program at Ohio University,” she said.
Following her 1999 BHS graduation, she obtained a degree in visual communication from OU and thereafter interned at the Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg, where she worked for about a year before she and her husband Lee relocated to Columbus, Ohio. There, she worked a combined seven years at the Columbus Dispatch, first as a page designer and later in the news and features department.
Now a work-at home mom of nearly six-year-old Steven and three-year-old Dean, Delaveris has discovered a career opportunity which fits into her lifestyle.
“In general, I do stationery design. My focus lately has been trying to get more designs for sale through a company called Minted,” she said. “The site is unique in that it is crowdsourced. They pull all their designs from the community, who submits designs. Most of the sites they compete against contract designers.”
The flipside is although a design is submitted, there are no guarantees it will be accepted. That happens through either winning a design challenge or being chosen as an editors’ pick. Currently, Delaveris has 21 designs available for purchase through Minted.
“In years past, it was about love of the game; now it’s starting to turn into more of a business focus,” she said. “More of my efforts are paying off and I’m now able to figure out what customers are looking for in products.”
Delaveris said she competes against some very talented artists from throughout the world.
“I'm not an artist. I consider myself more of a designer – fitting words and pictures together,” she said.
Already doing freelance work with custom-design Christmas cards and wedding invitations, Delaveris discovered Minted through a promotion for address label designs. After entering that challenge, she went on to enter a baby shower design contest and then a host of others.
“They have a submission period and a voting period during which customers, designers, friends and family members can vote,” she said. “Designs are ranked on a scale from 1 to 5 – 5 being the best. The scores are tallied up and the top 30 designs are guaranteed to be sold on the site. You win a prize and they buy the design from you and you also get commission on the sale of each product featuring that design. You earn money and you don’t have to worry about fulfillment and company service; just the fun design part.”
The feedback Delaveris receives has also been important in the development of her home-based business.
“There are polls for designers to offer design feedback,” she said. “It’s really a very cool creative community and very supportive. Even before I had very many picks, I still liked to submit because it helped me grow as a designer and was a fun, creative outlet.”
Much has changed about her life in the past 16 years or so, but that “aha” moment at BHS - when she realized that her design talent could be her career - is still in the forefront.
.PNG)
“I’ve been pretty laser focused,” she said. “I love that I can still do this even while being a work-at-home mom. I can still use my degree while I’m home with my kids.”
Minted is a design marketplace, sourcing creative content from a global community of independent artists, then selling the best content in the form of art, home décor, and stationery, directly to consumers. An early pioneer of crowdsourcing, Minted has held art and design challenges monthly since April 2008. Challenges are open for both submission and voting. The "crowd" curates Minted's product selection by rating products and Minted utilizes analytics to evaluate votes.
Lea is the oldest daughter of Steve and Irene Sellas. Her brother Nicholas and sisters Stephanie and Maria are also BHS graduates.
Visit Delaveris's Minted page and view her products HERE. Visit her Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/LeaDelaverisDesign
Follow Delaveris on Social Media here:
