Tiny Turns Paperie
6-Post Instagram Series — Boosting the stationery store’s social media presence to reach the Somerville community.
The client
Tiny Turns Paperie is a stationery shop at Bow Market in Somerville. Owner Jen Palacio left a career in corporate IT to make cards by hand. She spent Thursdays behind the counter at Bow Market's original stationery shop, and eventually opened Tiny Turns Paperie. This stationery store is designed to be welcoming to everyone who enters.
The shop's Instagram featured updates and announcements about the store’s weekly goings-on, but didn’t tell their story. Jen and her small team were busy actually running the store, and posting happened whenever someone found a spare minute. What they needed was simple: content that sounded like them, ready to post, with no agency retainer attached.
The idea
Jen describes opening Tiny Turns as an experiment. Her hypothesis: can a new shop nobody has heard of yet become a place where anyone can feel welcome?
Rather than inventing a content angle, I built six posts that each answer her hypothesis differently. Her founding story opens the arc by posing the question. A craft night recap shows how Tiny Turns welcomes the community. A pen personality quiz proves there's something on the shelves for everyone. A post that shows off the physicality of stationery explains why the shop matters in a screen-heavy world. Customer interviews let real visitors share their experience themselves. And an invitation to send real mail is set as the closer, encouraging customers to welcome their loved ones to the world of letter writing.
The process
Everything was written in Jen's voice, drawn from her real story rather than a manufactured brand tone. If a line didn't sound like something she'd say, it got cut.
I spent an afternoon on the shop floor asking customers one question, "what brought you in today?", and turned five of their answers into a carousel. The best voice for a neighborhood shop is its neighbors. I value customers' authentic feedback over made-up copy that sounds pretty.
I also rebuilt drafts around what the team actually confirmed. The craft night post, for example, started from my assumptions and ended up rewritten around the details staff verified, down to the cart that wheels the tester pen bar over from the store.
Because the team is small and the owner is busy, the working process stayed light on purpose. Short emails with clear asks, one round of review, and drafts that moved forward without waiting on replies.
The handoff
The final deliverable is a package the shop can run entirely on its own: copy-paste captions for all six posts, slide-by-slide text for the carousels, photos organized in folders by post, and a suggested cadence. It also includes a repeatable template, so every future craft night can become a fresh post, and a story idea for the shop's next anniversary.
That's the standard for everything I hand off.
If a client needs me around to use what I made, I haven't finished the job.
Amory Creative writes website copy, email, and social content for small businesses around Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston in a voice that sounds just like a neighbor. If your shop has a story like this one, I'd love to hear it.