Vienna Artist Boosts Small, Local Handicraft Businesses
As a hobby just a few years ago, she took up modern calligraphy.
Now she operates two thriving local businesses dedicated to selling her artworks and supporting small, local, handicraft businesses.
For Vienna, Virginia-based Liz Powell – owner of Write Liz Write and Shop Like You Live Here – the holidays are a busy time. But they’re also a joyous opportunity to design product lines that celebrate and promote northern Virginia and Maryland’s unique town handicrafts and market cultures.
The Falls Church Independent interviewed Powell to find out how she’s been able to launch her ventures so effectively, what inspires her artwork, and her unique product offerings. We first met Powell at a local Maker’s Market over the summer at Botanologica in Falls Church.
“I have two different businesses,” Powell said. “One is Write Liz Write which has a focus on wedding calligraphy, custom seating charts, place cards, and other beautiful details for wedding receptions. And then the newest part of my business is called Shop Like You Live Here and that has more of a focus on locally-inspired products, especially local, northern Virginia and Maryland towns and Virginia- and Maryland-themed items.”
For a “pop-up shop of local artisans and small businesses offering their unique holiday-inspired goods and gifts,” Powell will be vending her locally-themed graphic-design prints and original watercolor paintings at the Winter Holiday Market at the PARC at Tysons at 8508 Leesburg Pike, this Saturday, Dec. 14, from 12 - 5:00 p.m. "Liz captures the charm of Virginia with beautiful local art prints, cards, and stickers that celebrate the places you love," Celebrate Fairfax, host of the event, posted on Instagram.
The park will be “transformed into a festive winter village, featuring a local holiday market, an iceless skating rink, and other snow-tastic activities for the whole family to enjoy!”
For the last two years, Powell has designed and sold online carefully cultivated local handicraft giftboxes that not only meet gift-shoppers’ needs but help support local artisans. “So my biggest holiday project is definitely the gift box which I organized with other northern Virginia handmade businesses,” Powell said. “And it’s such a fun project.”
“This is my second year doing it,” Powell continued. “We, unfortunately, just finished our pre-order, so that’s not available at the moment, but if anybody is interested in that for next year, you can sign up on shoplikeyoulivehere.com for email updates and you’ll be the first to know when our next box is released.”
At the Winter Holiday Market, Powell will be offering many popular locally-themed artworks she designed and created. “I have a series of local Virginia town prints available on the Shop Like You Live Here website and I’m excited to have prints as well as greeting cards, my newest Virginia Map Tote Bag – I’m excited to add that to my market box – as well as lots of fun Virginia-themed stickers.”
Describing her artistic wares, Powell said, “Most of my artwork is digital illustration and there’s also some actual watercolor paintings I painted by hand and are for purchase… Other than the gift boxes, everything I do is my own original artwork.”
Powell laughed as she was asked about her artistic training, saying there’s a story to tell. “My art background is always so funny to be asked about because I never thought of myself as ‘an artist’ or anything remotely artistic when I was growing up. My brother was the ‘artist in the family,’ and I was ‘the student.’ [Laughs]. And we had our defined roles.”
“But,” Powell continued, “it wasn’t until I was in college and I was graduating into a recession with a marketing degree [that I saw] the school I went to, Lehigh University, [had] an amazing program where if you get a certain GPA, you can get a 5th year free. So, I decided it would be a great time to get a graphic design degree in a year.”
“And, in order to get a graphic design degree, you have to take drawing, painting, sculpture, and all of these classic arts classes,” Powell continued. “And I was definitely a fish-out-of-water in those, but it was such a fun journey of self-discovery because I realized that, ‘Oh, maybe I am a little bit artistic.’ [Laughs].”
So, how did Powell hit on the idea to launch her own arts business?
“So that's another story,” she said with a laugh. “In 2018, all of my friends were making Big Life Moves. Everyone was either buying a house, going back to school, moving across the country, or doing something Big. But I had a job that I liked, a house that I liked, and a husband that I liked. So, rather than do something to blow up my life, I thought, ‘I think I need a hobby.’"
“So, I started teaching myself hand-lettering, modern calligraphy by watching videos online,” Powell recalled. “And [I] slowly turned that into small projects for friends. And then in the fall of 2019 I did my first wedding for someone whom I had never met. So that was really exciting. And it kind of grew and evolved from there.” Thus Write Liz Write was born.
Then, of course, the pandemic struck in the spring of 2020. But, for Powell, new opportunities were presented.
“So, [the pandemic] was a double-edge sword in the wedding industry because in 2020 everything fell off. But then, in 2021, there was a boom because there was so much pent-up demand for weddings, that I was working absolutely around-the-clock to the point of burnout in 2021. And I found I couldn’t work enough hours to do all of the work coming my way. So that was incredible.”
“And it also sort of inspired Shop Like You Live here because I came to the realization that, ‘I need something that’s going to be more scalable in terms of not having to spend every waking hour creating things that will only be seen one time," Powell said. “So, what could I do that I could design once and then it would live on in the future?”
After some soul-searching combined with her own market analysis, Powell found a way of combining her personal passions with meeting market demands.
“I [had] moved to Vienna in 2015 and I love the local businesses we have in our area,” Powell said. “I think they add so much richness to the community and really make it a special place to live. So when I was trying to figure out what I could be interested in enough to create entire lines of products about, it was really the feeling of being excited about where you live and wanting to share that enthusiasm that was the first thing I really connected with. So that’s what started the art prints” side of the business.
But supporting local handicraft artisans and businesses was also a key value for Powell.
“So the idea of the gift boxes actually came from – I don’t know if you’re familiar with the local Facebook group called Vienna Foodies, but, [they have] an outsized influence compared to the town of Vienna itself – And it’s very active with lots of people who are very interested in supporting local businesses. And I kept seeing people asking [in their posts] for recommendations of places they could go to buy local products because they were trying to assemble a gift basket for a friend or something like that.”
“And eventually I started thinking, ‘You know, someone needs to just put some of these together because this is clearly a need that our community has and there are so many businesses that are home-based and don’t have the opportunity to have their items in retail stores or somewhere where you can just roll-up any time and purchase from them,” Powell continued. “So that’s what inspired the Northern Virginia Artisan Giftbox which I first launched in 2023 and repeated in 2024.”
So, how did Powell come by the tech savvy to manage her business websites and social media while controlling her expanding inventory?
Turns out her marketing degree had a certain utility. “So, I have actually managed websites for different companies and organizations for many years,” Powell said. “My career is in marketing. So, I’ve hosted many hours of backend on many websites and email systems and that definitely served me well when I was setting up my own website. There’s still a huge learning curve when you’re setting something up versus managing something. But, yes, it’s definitely been very helpful.”
As "another fun fact," Powell said one of her top-selling prints is “actually the State Theatre print from Falls Church.” In the image, she decided to modify the iconic local theatre’s marquee to feature the Legwarmers band, a local regular, “because I knew it couldn’t be any other band. And everyone who sees that print at market says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly who should be on the marquee.’ And that has been really fun.”
“People have shared so many memories about the State Theatre since I started having that print available at markets,” Powell continued. “Just this past weekend, three people told me they saw the original Star Wars there in 1977… They were saying they remembered waiting in a line around the block to get in to see Star Wars there.”
Asked what message she’d like to send out to Falls Church readers this holiday season, Powell said, “Consider how you’re shopping small, local, and handmade because it makes a huge difference in our local economy and really makes northern Virginia a wonderful place to live, to have all these local businesses. And we’d love to keep them around.”
For a charming Instagram video "asking local favorites about their local favorites" – featuring Liz Powell – see below:
By Christopher Jones
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