Calling Cards

While Cheree Berry’s childhood friends were going to the roller rink, she preferred the Hallmark store. 

Even from a young age, Berry loved nothing more than scanning through the shelves of greeting cards, reading the funny or emotional messages, and feeling the embellishments on the cards with her own hands. At home, she loved crafting her own designs, too — the crayons and markers hardly ever left the family breakfast table, should an occasion for a custom “thank you” or “get well soon” card arise.

Berry’s love of design eventually led the Bonne Terre, Missouri, native to earn her BFA in design from WashU in St. Louis. She was introduced to the world of stationery working as a designer and art director for Kate Spade New York in New York City, where she designed everyday correspondence notecards and developed the brand’s wedding stationery collection.

But as Berry’s own friends started getting engaged, they craved wedding invitations that were just a bit more unique to their own stories. “It’s really about storytelling,” Berry says. She began designing custom invitations for friends in her free time, and requests from East Coast clients continued to pile up even after she moved back to St. Louis. In 2006, she officially launched her own company, Cheree Berry Paper & Design.

In the company’s early days, the majority of Berry’s clients were still located in New York, so she’d fly in frequently to meet with brides at coffee shops and pore over stationery examples. As the St. Louis-based company continued to earn more clients and receive praise across the country, including press in Martha Stewart Weddings, New York Magazine, and The Today Show, Berry grew the company slowly and thoughtfully. 

She started with one part-time designer and in 2009, brought on Kristen Armstrong — a former client whose wedding invitations she designed — as Cheree Berry’s CFO. With Berry overseeing design and Amstrong managing the financials, they have since grown the company to a team of 30 designers, illustrators, project managers, and account managers, all but two of whom are based in St. Louis and serve customers nationwide.

While Cheree Berry continues to work with many brides directly, Armstrong has helped establish key relationships with event planners across the country. In 2010, for instance, Cheree Berry designed the wedding invitations for former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, which kicked off a longstanding partnership with premier planner Rafanelli Events.

As the brand has continued to grow in its reach, Armstrong says the team has homed in on who Cheree Berry Paper & Design is as a company and brand. 

“Our brand is joy,” Armstrong says. “We work with people usually during occasions in their lives that are joyful, whether that’s a wedding, a new baby, a retirement, a milestone birthday, or anniversary. We’re a brand that embraces joy, and we do it in a really polished, professional, creative way. It’s about marking life’s milestones along the way.” 

At Cheree Berry, that joy is unlocked through several key pillars, including clever copywriting, original artwork, and high-quality printing. While the company’s designers and illustrators work closely with clients to create stationery that’s unique to their personal story, each design adheres to the brand’s core pillars. 

“They all have their very different styles, but there is something about our work that makes people say, ‘This really feels like a Cheree Berry Paper invitation,’” Berry says. “The client will come in and sprinkle an idea to the designers and they take it and spin it into gold. It’s like Christmas morning for them when they see their proofs.”

Since storytelling drives the design process, copywriting is just as important to designers as the illustrations and images. But it’s the unexpected details, such as personalized postmarks or an illustration of a beloved pet carrying postage stamps, that are the true hallmarks of Cheree Berry designs. In addition to the standard information, invitations might include extra interactive elements, like a miniature pennant for guests to wave at the welcome party or a functional cocktail umbrella garnishing a farewell brunch card shaped like a Bloody Mary. Designed to surprise and delight, these extra details make each invitation a visual treasure hunt.

“We still want the experience to be intuitive, but maybe there are little surprises — like opening little gifts as you move through the collateral inside,” Berry says. “We’re really thinking about the engagement someone would have with our items. If you’re going to go to the trouble to actually send something through the mail nowadays, we want that surprise and delight. We need all the functional information to rise to the top, but when people pull the invitation out again, they might see something they didn’t see the first time — little fun things that are sort of baked into the experience.”

“(These details) are what make our work feel custom, personal, and thoughtful, and it often goes back to storytelling,” adds Carmi Podwojski, a senior designer. “An icon of Champagne glasses could represent a lot of couples. But a hand-drawn doodle of penguins drinking Champagne because the couple got engaged near the penguin house at the zoo? Now, that’s memorable. Putting it on paper helps tell the story.”

The brand has found plenty of success both locally and across the country, from St. Louis couples, corporations, and nonprofits such as St. Louis Children’s Hospital, The Muny, and WashU’s Olin Business School to high-profile clients like Today Show host Jenna Bush Hager, Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Ellie Kemper.

With a nationwide reputation and high-profile clients across the country, Cheree Berry Paper & Design could arguably be based anywhere, but Berry remains committed to keeping the business rooted in St. Louis. 

“I truly am a big lover of the city, and this will be home for me forever,” Berry says. “I went to WashU and St. Louis has been a great place to raise my family. I have been so lucky to find amazing talent that works with me; I’ve never had to bring in anybody from outside St. Louis, which is really amazing. The talent in this city is tremendous. So it’s kind of a win-win all around.”

Armstrong agrees, adding that St. Louis is a special place rich with talent and where entrepreneurs support and elevate one another to help everyone succeed.

“There is a vast amount of creative talent here, and I think that has definitely helped our company grow,” Armstrong adds. “We have wonderful schools here that train amazing designers. Also, some of our East Coast clients just really appreciate our Midwestern charm and the fact that we are a company rooted in relationships. Another nice thing about St. Louis is that people aren’t afraid to help you or give you information — it’s not cutthroat. I could ask to have a coffee with any of the founders or CEOs of any of the local agencies to pick their brain, and the answer would always resoundingly be yes. So while we want to run a successful business, there’s still that desire to help other entrepreneurs in our town.”

As Cheree Berry Paper & Design celebrates 20 years in business in 2026, the company plans to expand its retail collection that can still be personalized without the price tag of a fully custom project. The brand is also thinking about more ways to add joy and value to life’s little moments, from back-to-school banners to paper chargers and place cards, and continuing to build out its e-commerce site, which is where the retail collection is exclusively available.  

While the brand incorporates digital elements into many of its products, the team firmly believes that thoughtfully designed paper goods can play a powerful role in helping people find joy in major milestones and everyday moments alike. Armstrong and Berry have now been working with some clients for over a decade, watching their families grow as they celebrate milestone moments from weddings to baby announcements to bar and bat mitzvahs.

“With everything in this world moving to digital, being able to hold on to some of these print pieces, pulling them out and showing them to your kids and your grandkids, it’s like your life story unfolded,” Armstrong says. “Fundamentally, that’s who we are as a brand — we bring unexpected joy to occasions and life documentation.