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Welcome to Butterfly-Designs
This is a condensed pictorial history of our company, we hope you get to
know us a little better from this.
The Early Years
We have always had a great interest in Natural History and Anthropology so it was a natural when we decided to take what we already loved and turn it into a business. The first design we thought of was a little diorama consisting of a piece of tree bark with some dried flowers and a real butterfly mounted on them, it was an instant hit. When we came up with this idea we looked around and nobody was doing anything decorative with real butterflies. Soon we were traveling all over the country selling these little butterfly cases and telling our story to anyone who would listen. We quickly tried to expand what we were doing by adding other natural items like roses, seashells, pine cones, gemstones and we even began selling many of our old fossils that we had collected over the years in the same acrylic cases. Every piece we sold came with a small informative leaflet telling a little bit about the insects and the fossils inside.
(Our 1st line sheet we used to sell to shops in person along with a few samples.)
The Mid 1990"s
Before we knew it we were in the largest wholesale markets in the country and we were selling these little butterfly cases to everyone. As the shows got bigger we added a few large glass case displays filled with gemstone mounds and large floral arrangements as a centerpiece for our shows. By the end of our first few years we were represented by and doing shows with the top gift rep groups throughout the country. We quickly began to expand into other types of butterfly displays while still hand making every piece ourselves.
Our first published catalog
Two of our first Wholesale Gift Shows (Boston and Atlanta)
Our Collection of some of our Exhibitor Show Catalogs from all of the Wholesale Shows we have Participated in...
The Glass cases and acrylic wall hanging butterflies were a huge hit so
we expanded both of those lines
We also decided to include some butterflies in 2 sided glass cases
The Mid to late 1990's
In addition to all of the above we wanted to offer something a little more like wall art so we came up with the Idea of buying art prints and vintage maps and framing them with butterflies flying on them.
Then we added distressed barn wood frames to keep up with the decorating trends of the time.
The Late 1990's through 2003
We began heading towards more Contemporary themes
with elaborate Award Winning Displays.
(We were awarded the best in show in Atlanta and Denver)
The Sundance Catalog asked if we could frame some dried flowers in our
frames since they had never seen anything like them
and they wanted to include something like that in their catalog
We added a full line of framed dried flowers and herbs and sold them for a few years after that while still concentrating on the framed butterflies
2003 to Now
