On a summer evening in New York City, 20 women arrived at a secret address, dressed head to toe in their favorite pink. There was no conference badge, no vendor table, no sales pitch. Just a signature cocktail, a room full of strangers about to become friends, and 90 minutes designed for one thing: connection.
Building a Room, Not a Customer List: Inside Effie’s Paper’s Pink Paper Society
Welcome to The Pink Paper Society, the first community gathering hosted by Effie’s Paper — and, it’s founder Kalyn Johnson Chandler has her way, the first of many.
For the uninitiated, Effie’s Paper :: Stationery & Whatnot is a lifestyle brand Chandler founded 15 years ago and named after her feisty and wise grandmother. Today its stylish, motivational stationery and gift accessories are carried in more than 450 retailers and have been featured everywhere from The Today Show to The New York Times. But the throughline has never changed: her mission is to remind women to embrace their magic. “Pretty with a purpose,” Chandler calls it — products built to empower women, with a particular love for and reflection of Black women and the communities that raise them.
Which is exactly why The Pink Paper Society felt less like a marketing event and more like a natural extension of the brand’s mission.
“We’ve been inside too long,” Chandler said. “Somewhere after COVID, going out just to be around people — not for work, not for an errand — quietly stopped being a thing. I wanted to build a room where we could be together again.”
The night was pure Effie’s Paper. Guests sipped a custom cocktail dubbed “The Effie”. They made DIY purse charms to take home, and at a “Dear Future Me” letter-writing station, each woman wrote a note to herself — a hope, a reminder, a pep talk — that Effie’s Paper will mail back to her in November. Everyone left with a gift bag replete with goodies.
But the moment that stayed with Chandler wasn’t anywhere on the run-of-show.
As she and her team prepared to kick off the evening’s planned programming, the room refused to cooperate — because the women were too busy talking to one another. Loads of laughter, lots of chatter and the exchanging of Instagram handles was happening around the room. Lunch plans made between people who had walked in as strangers. Chandler and her director of operations caught each other’s eye and made a decision on the spot: let them talk. The program could wait.
“That was the whole point,” Chandler said.
By several accounts, the evening felt less like an event and more like a reunion of friends who simply hadn’t met yet — the kind of easy, unhurried gathering the culture of Black women’s hospitality has always understood. It’s a feeling Chandler says runs deeper than one party. She’s candid that an in-person gathering was never part of her business plan — but her customers, she says, showed her the need before she saw it herself.
“I didn’t set out to build a customer list. I set out to build a room,” she said. “A business isn’t just about what sells. It’s about people.”
For a brand built on empowering women — and for an audience of women who know the quiet power of a well-set table and a room full of their own — the takeaway landed. By night’s end, guests aren’t asking where to shop, they were asking when they could come back.
That question, Chandler says, is already reshaping her plans. A second Pink Paper Society soiree is in the works for late Fall, and the brand has launched a dedicated Instagram account, @ThePinkPaperSociety, where dates and tickets will be announced first. The gatherings are kept intentionally small — once the room is full, it’s full.
In a culture that teaches women to build audiences, followings, and funnels, Effie’s Paper is making a quieter bet: that what women want most can’t be measured in click-through rates. It’s a seat in the room, a note to their future selves, and the particular magic of being seen — in person, in pink, together.
“You belong wherever the pink is,” Chandler said. And come late Fall, there will be more another room filled with Pink to prove it.
