Cape Central sophomore uses artistic skills to start business

Think back to your sophomore year of high school. What were you doing?

Most of us were getting involved in extracurricular activities, finding “our crowd” and hanging out with friends, attending football games, homecomings and proms, while still managing our GPA and preparing for the ACT or SAT.

Ella Rose Ferguson, a sophomore at Cape Girardeau Central High School, is no different. Well, besides being the owner of a small business called Ella Rose Originals.

Ella Rose released the company’s first product in mid-October: a 12-month, hand-drawn bullet journal called the Plournal.

The Plournal, which Ella Rose describes as a “planner plus a journal,” includes themed pages hand-drawn by Ella Rose, and has features such as Netflix watch logs, mood trackers and water logs, which track moods throughout the month and the amount of water consumed in a day, respectively.

When Ella Rose received a blank bullet journal — a journal that organizes scheduling, reminders, to-do lists, brainstorming and other organizational tasks into a single notebook — from her aunt for Christmas, she saw it as an opportunity to let her creative juices flow.

She designed a few pages and showed them to her immediate family, who were all impressed with her artistic abilities.

“She came downstairs and said, ‘Look what I did,’ and it was these beautiful pages of different mood pages and trackers — I think she liked designing the pages and drawing more than she liked the actual journaling part,” said Raelenna Ferguson, Ella Rose’s mother. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, people would totally buy those.’”

Ella Rose said she has always been a fan of the fine arts, with a history in competitive dance, musical theater, piano and art classes, but she said what has stuck with her the most has been art classes.

“I don’t really draw pictures, but I like doing lettering and just making some pretty basic stuff with small designs and line work and things like that,” Ella Rose said. “And I didn’t really think too much about it; it’s just something I like to do as a creative outlet.”

Raelenna Ferguson, left, and her daughter Ella Rose, 16, pose for photos with the first product launched by Ella Rose Originals: the Plournal, on Nov. 6 at One City in Cape Girardeau.Brooke Holford

Starting a business

Raelenna, co-founder of One City in Cape Girardeau and other local businesses, said she saw it as an opportunity to nourish her daughter’s creative spirit and combine it with her other interests to create a business.

“We’ve always seen that [Ella Rose] is smart, but she’s also got this really unique creative side, so that’s kind of why we tapped into that,” Ella Rose said. “And I enjoy entrepreneurship — we own a couple of businesses — so my mind is always on finding people’s gifts and skill set and trying to figure out, like, ‘What can they do with that?’ or ‘How could we make the world better with that? What can we put into the world?’ So, it’s taking people’s already God-given talents and what they were born with and turning it into something more.”

In March, Raelanna said when it started becoming clear schools wouldn’t be meeting in-person for a while because of the coronavirus pandemic, she thought it was the perfect time to send some photos of her daughter’s work to a publisher.

Ella Rose said she didn’t think anything would happen with it, but one day she came downstairs and her mom said, “We have a Zoom meeting with this publisher, I sent her some pictures of your stuff and they really liked it and they want to see some more of it and meet with you.”

“We had that meeting, and I drew up examples for what I’d want for every month, and our publisher really liked it,” Ella Rose said. “It was just crazy, like this is actually happening — that’s when it kind of hit.”

And thus, the Plournal was born and Raelenna became a business partner to her 16-year-old daughter.

Raelenna said she mainly managed things on the back end, such as deadlines, getting Ella Rose in touch with publishers and website creators, and obtaining trademarks.

“I’m very into things like outcomes and goals, so it wasn’t always fun and happy,” Raelenna said with a laugh. “We would be mad at each other — or at least, she would definitely be mad at me or we would have some disagreements — because I was usually the one laying down the timelines because I could see all that had to be done.”

Ella Rose Ferguson, 16, a sophomore at Cape Girardeau Central High School, poses for photos with the Plournal, her first production, on Nov. 6 at One City in Cape Girardeau.Brooke Holford

Putting it together

Ella Rose said each month in the Plournal consists of 12 to 13 pages, and it took four months to create from start to finish. They received the first prototype in July.

Raelenna said she wanted Ella Rose to learn how to manage the business herself, so she taught her daughter how to create spreadsheets and had her attend meetings with publishers by herself, as well as making most of the creative decisions.

“My husband told someone just the other day she had, like, the best education [during COVID] because she was on the Zoom calls with a publisher and she’s figuring out how she wants it,” Raelenna said. “Our publisher would ask me questions and I would say, ‘I don’t know. I need to talk to Ella about it,’ because she was the one designing it how she wanted it, and determining the ins-and-outs of everything — every page, every design — and, obviously, I’m going to have some different views because she’s designing it for preteens and teenagers.”

Ella Rose said creating the cover was one of the hardest parts, and the part that came with the most tears because “she wanted it to be perfect.”

The front cover reads, “I am original: One of a kind,” which Raelenna said is a play off of the name of her company, Ella Rose Originals, but also pays tribute to her product, which is all hand-drawn and then scanned to create the Plournal.

Ella Rose said even with the tears and frustrations, working with her mom is fun because they are “really similar,” to the point that everybody jokes about how there are two of them.

With Ella Rose getting older, she said her mom has become a “huge inspiration” to her and this business is something they get to do together, and an opportunity for Ella Rose to learn from her mom.

“I have five kids, and out of all of them, it would be her that I get to help manage and teach business to. If there’s anybody that I can take my skill set to and be like, ‘We should create something; let’s build something; let’s do something,’ it’s going to be her,” Raelenna said. “I love coaching people and teaching people in general — I feel like if you know something, or you’re good at something, why wouldn’t you share that with others? So it’s really beautiful that now I get to do that with Ella since she’s old enough to do that, and it just came so naturally and I enjoy it a lot.”

‘Pursue it’

On top of being a teen entrepreneur, Ella Rose is a varsity cheerleader, third time class president, member of Beta Club and Future Business Leaders of America, along with many other clubs, and says one of her favorite things to do is spend time with her friends and family.

“[My parents] always tell me, ‘You’re never too young to do anything,’ and it’s really true, like, if you have something and you want to pursue it, and you want to make it work, you can do it — no matter how young you are, and I hope I can help a lot of other kids understand that, too,” Ella Rose said. “I know a lot of people just think, ‘I can’t impact anything’ or ‘I don’t really have much power to do anything yet,’ but what I learned [through this process] is I could really do it. Like, I can start a business and I can go to school and I can have friends and all this great stuff can happen.”

Since launching in October, Ella Rose Originals has sold around 250 Plournals, and Ella Rose said they just received a second shipment.

To learn more about the Plournal or place an order, visit www.ellaroseoriginals.com.