By Matt Skoufalos
During the work week, Kernesha Weatherly is vice president of imaging at the New Orleans, Louisiana-headquartered Ochsner Health System, which spans 40 hospitals, 60 private care clinics, and even more freestanding centers throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
But even when she’s not in the office, the day doesn’t necessarily slow down. Two years ago, the Montgomery, Alabama native launched her own small business, Makena Prints; today, its sales have reached customers in every state of the contiguous United States.
The story of how Weatherly parlayed a knack for gift wrapping into a stationery boutique with a nationwide reach starts at her kitchen table, where the self-taught artist began experimenting with patterns and ideas for wrapping paper, tissue paper, gift bags and present tags featuring people of various ethnicities.
The word Makena is Swahili for “delighted,” and Weatherly picked it up on a trip to Kenya, where she heard it said quite frequently. It seemed fitting for the intention of her work, which is to connect with audiences who don’t always find themselves represented in the artwork that adorns most commercially available gift goods.
“I wanted people to be happy before they even received their gifts,” Weatherly said. “Trying to find wrapping papers that represented kids of different cultures or different ethnicities was challenging. I did a couple mock-ups, showed it to a few friends, and it went from there. It blossomed in Alabama, word got out, and it spread like wildfire.”
Today, Makena offers more than 22 different wrapping paper designs for every occasion: holidays, birthdays, graduations, baby showers, father’s and mother’s days, and more. Her designs showcase “an array of the different people in the world,” and many of them are inspired by Weatherly’s own family photographs.
After a crash course at “the University of YouTube and the School of Google,” Weatherly learned how to digitize and modify images from her own photo album into computer graphics that could be developed into paper goods, and then worked to find stationery factories to produce them.
“I pull inspiration from my life and my background,” she said. “The birthday girl is a picture of me that I made into a cartoon; the boy is my little brother. Mrs. Claus is a picture of my grandmother. One picture is of me blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. Since I’m a nuclear medicine technologist by background, our white coats were the inspiration for one design with kids in lab coats.”
Then, just as Weatherly had the bones of the business lined up, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic hit, and everything halted. Her original goal of a 2020 launch would be deferred until January 2021, and the business really ramped up in the 2021 holiday season.
Suddenly, Weatherly was speaking with vendors in multiple countries (and time zones), working to establish wholesale relationships (she’s up to seven), and positioning Makena for placement on Amazon.com. Throughout it all, she leaned on her experience as both a health care professional and a retail professional.
“It was a lot of long nights,” Weatherly said. “Even prior to getting into health care I worked in retail management for years, and was able to tap into some of that brain. I can truly say that my years of working helped prepare me for this even though I didn’t see it coming. Health care is health care, but it’s also customer service and retail, whether people believe it or not. Having conversations with customers in the retail space is no different than service recovery in the health care space. I was able to transition that into working with my business.”
Even as the business continues to develop, Weatherly said she’s consistently surprised to see how much the work she’s done resonates with a variety of audiences. A friend who teaches in a rural area has repurposed some of her misprints into crafts for her students. Other children who see wrapping paper with faces that resemble their own on it “respond to it and are shocked,” she said, and adults who give gifts in Makena gift bags might be bold enough to try to take the bags back afterwards.
“I get a lot of feedback from people that tell me it has helped them with gift-giving,” Weatherly said. “A young lady found me because she wanted to wrap gifts for her staff, who were Black, and she shared with me their responses. Things like that are absolutely special. It’s beautiful to see people gift with intention. Something that someone may consider to be a relatively small gesture really changes a lot.”
Finding cultural representation in art is “absolutely powerful,” Weatherly said, and helped her to view differently her own position as a Black woman supervising a service line at Ochsner.
“For me, seeing the representation, and being out there, it allows people to be authentic within themselves,” Weatherly said. “You are seeing afros and braids and puffs, and seeing that you can still wear the white coat and be successful. Being at a point where you can authentically live out loud and be yourself, and be comfortable with that, is an absolutely beautiful feeling that I did not see growing up, nor in my transition moving up to leadership. You are one person in this space, and when you clock out, then you can take your mask off. It’s challenging to navigate.”
Today, Weatherly is working to grow Makena Prints for a broader audience and broader array of gift-giving occasions. Even in an age where many gifts are digital or plastic, she believes in the emotional response of a wrapped gift, and its ability to delight the recipient.
“For us, it is elevating the world of gift-giving,” she said. “There is something special about a wrapped gift. Listening to people talk about how it has helped them with gift-giving, it’s a beautiful thing to see.”
