About Creative Kind
Some people start businesses because they have a great idea.
I started Creative Kind because I wanted to make friends.
It was 2015. I'd just graduated, just gone freelance, and suddenly the built-in social infrastructure of school was just — gone. No hallways, no classrooms, no easy reasons to be around people. I needed a way back into community, and "making things" turned out to be it.
Creative Kind grew from that need. It's an Arizona-rooted stationery and paper goods brand built around the belief that small, thoughtful gestures are one of the most underrated ways we take care of each other. Greeting cards, stickers, gel pens, bookmarks — things that say I was thinking about you in the quietest, realest way.
A Little Lift, a social action card deck, came from the same place. Fifty prompts designed to help people take small, tangible actions toward the people and communities around them, because connection doesn't usually happen in grand gestures. It happens in the tiny ones we actually follow through on.
I relocated to Chicago in 2025 — my second crash course in building community from scratch as an adult — and Creative Kind has grown with me: from a personal coping mechanism to a brand carried by independent retailers who believe the same things we do about connection, care, and the power of a good card.
If you're a retailer, a gift-giver, or just someone who believes that showing up for people matters — you're in the right place.
Meet Theresa (she/her), Founder & Wearer of Many Hats
Theresa Delaney is a brand strategist, maker, and founder on a decade-long mission to prove that small gestures are how we actually take care of each other.
After graduating from the University of Arizona, Theresa started Creative Kind. What began as a side hustle grew into a full ecosystem: weekly craft workshops, drop-in DIY projects, a curated shop featuring local makers and small businesses, and eventually two brick-and-mortar retail and event spaces. At its height, Creative Kind was a gathering place, a launchpad for local craftspeople, and proof that creativity and community belong in the same room.
Both stores are now closed, but that chapter ending clarified something important: the heart of Creative Kind was never the storefront. It was the belief that connection is built in small, repeatable moments — and that the right object, prompt, or gesture can make showing up for someone a little easier and a lot more habitual.
Today, Creative Kind is a wholesale stationery and paper goods brand carried by independent retailers nationwide: greeting cards, stickers, gel pens, bookmarks. Things designed to be given away. And A Little Lift — a 50-card deck of small, tangible prompts for strengthening relationships and community — is the most direct expression yet of everything Theresa has been building toward since that first workshop in 2015.