I built a planner business. Me. The kid who got a shower curtain hung across her bookshelf because my mum couldn't look at the mess anymore.
If you'd told seven-year-old me, the one sewing Pokemon toys out of old bed sheets and selling them on the street, that she'd one day run a stationery brand, she'd have believed you (she had range). If you'd told twenty-five-year-old me, sitting in a one-bedroom unit covered in breast milk with postnatal depression, she'd have laughed in your face.
This is the story of how it actually happened. Not the highlights reel. The real one.
Not the founder you follow. Not the person who seems to have it all together. Not me, seven years and three warehouses in. We are all winging it.
I know that sounds like bad news. It's the opposite. It means the people who do the thing actually aren't the ones who figured it out first. They're the ones who started before they knew what they were doing. You achieve things by doing, not planning, and yes, I'm a planner brand founder saying that. The irony is not lost on me.
It's the same as motherhood. I read every baby book before I had my first daughter, Harper. I was going to be SO ready. Then I had a child and went "oh, f**k." You learn it by doing it, badly, at 3am, while crying. That's how we grow.
Growing up, I was always the messy kid. I was diagnosed with ADD at six, which for a girl in the nineties was unheard of. It felt like my brain had twenty million conversations going at once while everyone else's seemed quiet. My mum literally hung a plastic shower curtain with dolphins on it across my bookshelf because she couldn't deal with my constant mess.
That curtain became a metaphor for how my whole family handled things: hide the mess behind a curtain and pretend it isn't there. The problem is the mess keeps accumulating until it comes bursting out onto the floor.
Then I reached high school, and suddenly everyone seemed to know what their one thing was going to be. Teacher, policeman, pilot… and there I was thinking, my boobs have only just come in and you want me to pick the uniform I'll shove them into for life? I was always multipassionate. I wanted to do all the things. Not just one. I couldn’t understand how everyone else was so clear. It felt like they’d all been handed a map for life, except me.
So I became the jack of all trades. I studied journalism at uni. Then pivoted and went to makeup school (I was booked out two years ahead). I joined the gym… then got my trainer qualifications. People would say "oh Steph, you're such a jack of all trades," and I'd brace for the "master of none."
That's when my dad found me outside Woolies handing out pamphlets for the gym I worked at, and told me I was better than this. He meant well. But neither of us understood that what looked like scattering was about to become the entire point.
Steph Pase Planners didn't start with a business plan. It started with a young mum sitting in her lounge room with her first baby and postnatal depression.
I was twenty-five. I had no mum friends. Covered in breast milk, feeling like a failure, desperate to connect with someone who got it. I couldn't change the big thing, so I changed the little things. I built my first morning routine. I tried to control my external environment because inside was chaos. Bit by bit, I started to feel better
I turned back to writing. I said to Ryan "what if I started a blog?" I put it off for weeks because it felt wanky. And then I got to the point where I was just so lonely and craving that connection that Ryan said, “just do it”. And I did. I felt so self-conscious that I turned the name into a bit of a joke. I called it Just Another Mummy Blog… and got stuck with the name for years.
I posted every day, sharing my honest thoughts as a ‘messy’ mum. And for the first time, women started commenting "me too." So I started sharing the templates I made for my own messy brain. My cleaning schedule got downloaded over 100,000 times in more than 50 countries. "Stephing" became a word. The accidental blog became my full-time job.
My love for planners was all sparked by a 2000s movie called New York Minute with Mary-Kate and Ashley, the Olsen twins. There was Mary-Kate who played the messy, chaotic twin in the movie. She was very much me. She had the band T-shirt. She was just an absolute mess, like couldn't get herself out of bed. And then there was Ashley’s character, Jane Ryan. Jane became my icon. She was so well put together. She was super organised. In the opening scene she wakes up and she opens this beautiful planner.
I had always loved the start of a new school year when you get your new stationery and it would feel like a reset, a new year, new me kind of thing. So when I saw Jane and that planner, I was just obsessed.
I don't think it was essentially the planner itself. It was a symbol of everything that I wasn't and everything that I wanted to be.
I wanted to be proactive. I wanted to be organised. I wanted to have a memory that actually worked. I didn't want to be all over the place all the time. I didn't want to be such a mess. That thought stuck with me for a long time.
I was sitting by the tree with my cousin Laure. I turned to her and said "what do you think if I made a planner?" She gave me the answer I needed: "people would eat that sh*t up." (That's Gen Z for yes.)
I had tried so many planners over the years, and I'd only ever use it for two weeks then lost interest. They were always black and white, with boring layouts, and no prompts or reminders to help me remember to do the things that seem to come naturally to everyone else, but not to me.
So, the next morning I opened a Word doc and brain-dumped every single thing I'd ever wanted in a planner that didn't exist. Colour. Challenges. Meal planning. Because our brains aren't a Google Drive, we need external visual cues to function.
It took a year. A graphic designer (another mum named Steph) turned my terrible doodles into designs. Samples cost $450 US a pop, each one a small panic attack. Then finally one arrived and I teared up, because she was perfect. Even Ryan said "I didn't know a planner could look that good." I took a deep breath, put down what felt like a huge deposit, and got ready to hit launch.
My biggest dream was to maybe sell a thousand planners. Turns out, I sold 10,000. I hit live on my first launch and we broke the internet. My planners sold out, reordered, and sold out again.
Then reality hit: guess who has to pack 10,000 planners? Yours truly, with a baby and a toddler in tow, on a camp table in my driveway. I didn't know how to batch-print labels, so I printed them one by one. A hundred labels took an hour. So I got up at 3am to print enough to get to lunch, then did it again. For months.
I really needed help so I paid friends to help me pack, and eventually took the leap and hired my first staff member.
I held my first ever event, the SPP Launch Party. The event sold out in under an hour. It was the most surreal moment. I could finally hug and meet my beautiful online community in person. The people who had finally made me feel seen, and who needed my planners as much as I did.
A reunion is well overdue!
(Fun fact: Mr Pase let his nerves get the better of him, had too many beers and got kicked out at 10pm 🤣).
My business was built completely backwards. I had the community but no staff, no processes, no idea. So it came with mistakes. I got ripped off by a manufacturer. A staff member I treated like family stole from me, and the heartbreak hit harder than the money. A warehouse flooded and I lost over 100,000 pens. I did, in fact, cry over spilt ink that day.
I don't regret a single one of those mess-ups. Now I know what I want, and more importantly, what I don't. Always a lesson, never a failure. But here's what I had to learn the hard way. When we hide the hard parts, we build an illusion that makes everyone else think they're the only one struggling. So I stopped hiding the mess.
My actual business motto is "f**k around and find out," because if you don't do the first part, you never get to the second.
The next year, I launched new products and the garage began to overflow. Stock was taking over my house, and my life, so I made the terrifying leap and rented my very first warehouse. It felt way too big, but it was a huge milestone I never thought I would reach.
Each year I added new planners and organisational products to the collection on my mission to help more and more people. Suddenly, I was being invited to speak at events not as an “influencer”, but instead as a business owner.
Today, we’re in our third warehouse. A warehouse that looks nearly identical to the one on my vision board. And as my product range continues to grow, so does my team and my mission. But the one thing that has never changed is my purpose: to help messy minds like mine.
Little girl Steph was a mute. I barely spoke, I'd skull a beer before a uni speech just to get a sentence out. But my Nan always told me I'd do some cool things one day. And it turns out I did.
All along I was so ashamed of my mess. But in reality, it was my map.
So if there's one thing you take from this: start before you're ready, and back yourself 100%. You're not going to feel ready. None of us ever are. Just do it scared anyway. Because I promise you, you’ve got this.
I’ll always be the chaotic girl in the garage, juggling babies and boxes. I will be forever grateful for those first orders and the people who believed in me even when I didn't believe in myself.
LOVE, STEPH x
