Custom Books and Announcements Capture Your Story Beautifully

Are you looking for a clever holiday or birthday gift for a loved one? Perhaps you’d like a keepsake for a child’s special birthday that they will cherish for years to come. Part scrapbook, part photo album, and without the mess and hassle of doing it yourself, Pam Turos of Enduring Notions offers beautiful custom digital story books and more.

Pam Turos has always been creative, whether it’s scrapbooking, crafts projects, or even digital design, she’s always challenged herself ‘to create things for less than what I can purchase them in a store.’ Prior to having children, Pam applied her creativity to her job as a social worker helping terminally ill children and cancer survivors “create photo keepsakes to share with those they love and preserve the ’stories’ of their lives.”

After giving birth to her first child, Pam received a number of compliments on the scrapbook pages she made for his baby book. Sensing a business opportunity and wanting to stay at home, Pam took her creative energies and channeled them into a scrapbooking business, Enduring Notions. The cost of the materials and labor intensive nature of custom work made the pricing such that it wasn’t affordable to most of the people interested in the product. So, pregnant with her second child, Pam began to look for an affordable, efficient way to store and display photos while maintaining a creative, personal flair.

Making the move to digital.
After doing some research, Pam determined that, “(d)igital design was the answer! Instead of spending hours and hours on a single scrapbook page, I could now design an entire storybook in just a weekend. And the more I learned about digital design, I began to realize that I could recreate many of the elements I loved most about scrapbooking on the pages of my digital storybooks. By the time my second son was two weeks old, I was able to design a beautiful photo birth announcement, a coordinating storybook AND birth announcement magnets!”

Going digital also gave Pam the flexibility to work around her family life, which was the reason she wanted to work from home to begin with. Now she’s able to work and have time for walks along the Lake Erie shoreline in her neighborhood.

Today, Pam offers clients custom, digital storybooks, annoucements, and invitations. Pam says that clients have often seen a sample of her work and bring their own ideas as to what they want. If they haven’t already seen a sample, Pam shows them a gallery to give them some ideas to start with. While she’ll use existing work as a starting point, “I will never create an exact replica of anything I’ve created - this way each customer is guaranteed a truly unique end product… instead of trying to fit something into a template design that may or may not work with a client’s photo(s).”

Once clients have an idea of what they want, Pam offers storybook clients a one hour consultation to gather information and develop an outline. She then creates a few pages to ensure that she’s captured the client’s vision. At that point she creates the whole book and clients have a final print approval review before it goes to the printer. For clients interested in custom announcements, invitations and holiday cards, Pam provides a low-resolution proof within 48 hours of receiving the order.

Because Pam’s work is custom, her clients come to her for a variety of reasons. Some want storybooks to celebrate milestones like birthdays or to act as a digital babybook. Others use it as a way to remember a loved one. Pam says one of the most unique and touching storybooks she created was for a mother of three young children who lost her husband and wanted a storybook to give to her children on father’s day that celebrated their dad, “She wanted a storybook that captured the essence of her husband, and she planned to give it to them as a gift on their first Father’s Day following his death. The book was called ‘Our Daddy . . .’ and each page was a different characteristic or phrase that described him with coordinating photographs and scanned memorabilia such as letters he had written, etc.. Some of the pages were Our Daddy . . . ‘was a son’,'was a goofball’ or ‘loved our Mommy’ or ‘was a hero’, “told the best bed-time stories,’etc.”

Prices are reasonable and vary based on the complexity and size of the project. See sample baby storybooks here. For more information about announcements and invitations and to order, check out www.enduringnotions.com.