Nestnotes

My obsession with capturing family memories seems to be hard-coded in my DNA. From my immigrant grandfather who was embarrassed by his italian heritage and eager to escape the life of poverty he was raised in. Wanting to blend in to him meant discarding his family history and creating a new one. His lack of stories fills my life with questions to this day.

And then there was my grandmother, now 100 years old, who documented her whole life—both the highs and the lows—and created such a vivid picture of her life that I felt I was part of it all.

Both of them, in completely different but equal ways, would forever shape my infatuation with family stories.

Nestnotes (formerly StrangeBirdy) was founded after the birth of my first daughter. I wanted to find a unique way to celebrate all the wild firsts that came with her first year. And so I created an infographic style visualization of her first year and shared it on pinterest. It took on a life of its own and after a lot of requests for custom orders, I decided to create a version that parents could fill out and frame at home.

As my daughter grew and my second daughter was born, the desire to document our memories in a meaningful, lasting format outside of the ephemeral and curated world of social media, continued to grow. I wanted my daughter to be active contributors to our family narrative and so, together, we created the "Story of Me" and "Year of You" books. Interactive book sets designed to capture everythign there is to capture about a child at a particular age.

From there, our product line has continued to grow and we are excited with the library of products we are building.

All of our keepsakes are designed to be cherished and shared across generations. We strive to make keepsakes worthy of your memories and put a tremendous amount of thought and care into every element of our designs--from the paper it's printed on to the memories we select to capture. We are dedicated to making things that will impress the big members of your family as much as the little ones.

All products are created by Chase in collaboration with illustrators she partners with.