Cupcakes were all the rage back in the early aughts, made popular by TV shows like “Sex and the City,” which highlighted New York City’s Magnolia Bakery. The height of the cupcake trend was 2008 — when the economy soured, cupcakes were an affordable luxury. 

That’s when crafting blogger Taylor VanBruggen began producing her “Cuppy” cupcake rubber stamps. Fast forward 17 years, and VanBruggen and her husband operate a growing rubber stamp factory in Ankeny.  

Serious business

While cupcakes, crafting and rubber stamps might sound like a light-hearted endeavor, it’s no laughing matter for the VanBruggens, who started Taylored Expressions out of their home in Southern California. 

Taylor VanBruggen was crafting and blogging as a hobby while her husband, Jon VanBruggen, attended graduate school. The couple met while attending Northwestern College in Orange City, Jon’s hometown. The two studied business; Taylor focusing on accounting and Jon homing in on finance and management.

“My first three stamp sets featured Cuppy, which was a little cupcake that was dressed up in Halloween costumes and went to the beach, and so that was our first three products that were shipped out of our garage,” Taylor said.

While it peaked in the 2000s, the crafting industry has remained strong. Market research data folds scrapbooking into the decorative paper industry, which is worth about $5.1 billion total, according to Future Market Insights. The industry is expected to have a 3.8% compound annual growth rate through 2035, growing to $7.8 billion in sales. U.S. online sales of hobby and craft supplies are estimated at more than $22 billion growing to $1.94 trillion by 2033, according to Customcy.

Rubber stamping falls within the scrapbooking and crafting industries when tracking national business statistics, but it is considerably more niche. There are dozens of rubber stamp manufacturers across the U.S., often small shops that produce logo stamps for local businesses. While it’s challenging to assess the growth of the crafting rubber stamp market, Taylored Expressions has about 70 direct competitors, Jon VanBruggen said. 

Fueling growth

The VanBruggens moved back to Iowa and in 2009 set up shop in Ankeny. They decided on the suburb because they saw the city’s potential and Taylor’s parents lived there. When the company leased its first space, they were unsure at first how they would fill 2,400 square feet. But before long, they needed even more room.

 “In three years, we were bursting at the seams and needed another space,” said Jon, who is the company’s CEO. 

During the next six years, the company held leases at a handful of different locations, as well as storage space. 

“It was becoming a bit of a mess. We talked to some advisers and they said, ‘You guys would be much better off building your own facility and bringing all operations and storage under one roof,’” he said. 

The company’s current building on Oak Drive, completed in 2022, houses office, design and factory space, filling 19,200 square feet.

“We’re already out of space,” Jon VanBruggen said. 

Taylored Expressions had intentionally grown slowly and steadily for several years. The couple, with three children at home, didn’t want to expand too quickly. They even passed on a few opportunities to keep the business more manageable. Then COVID-19 hit in 2020, and there was no stopping the growth. Many Americans were suddenly forced to stay home, sparking an explosion of home hobby interests. Crafting, scrapbooking, creating custom greeting cards for friends and family and rubber stamping surged in popularity. The company now employs about 40 people.

“COVID was a bit of a fuel on top of the fire for us,” Jon said. 

In March, the city of Ankeny approved a tax increment financing agreement with Taylored Expressions to help the company expand its factory and office space. The approved TIF is for $130,000 for five years on a sliding scale for the company’s 9,000-square-foot expansion at 1955 S.E. Oak Drive. The project will create six full-time jobs ranging from $29.76 to $35.71 per hour. 

A business inspired by connection

Taylor VanBruggen grew up in Sioux City with a jack-of-all-trades crafting mom who sold her artwork at craft shows. 

 “We would set up booths at different places and I always saw her entrepreneurial spirit. I think I have a little bit of that in myself,” said Taylor, who serves as Taylored Expressions’ creative director and owner, leading product development and design work. 

She discovered rubber stamping while Jon was studying theology in Southern California. 

“It was more of an accidental business than it was a business plan with a lot of goals or any of that. It was just stumbling into it more than anything, because it was something I loved and enjoyed,” she said. 

She was writing a blog and making cards for friends and family as a way to stay connected with her loved ones back in Iowa and the surrounding region. In the process, she inadvertently became a blogging influencer of sorts. 

“We were far away from family at that point, and I started a blog where I would post what we were doing and what we were up to, and I’d make a card every day and share it, write about it, write about our lives and then send those cards out and realize what a difference it would make to people who are receiving them,” she said. “That just spurred me on more, to make more cards, do more blogging.” 

Before long, she was attracting attention from product manufacturers. 

“As companies reached out, seeing me as a beginner influencer, they started to send me products and asked me to be on their design teams and create catalog samples,” she said. “I started doing more of that and getting a little bit more insight into what it looked like to be part of the same industry, run a business and started to connect with manufacturers.” 

The rubber stamp industry is smaller and more niche than most, making it easier to enter than other industries, she said. 

“After a year of my blog or so, I had 4 million hits of people that were reading and watching and commenting, and that was when the ideas started to come to me that I would want to try to sell things through my blog,” Taylor said. 

She hired a website designer and an illustrator to design her products and launched her first Cuppy cupcake stamps in September 2008. Her business quickly expanded to include dies, stencils, card stock and other crafting supplies. 

“I found an illustrator who drew adorable cupcakes and they had faces and a name,” she said. “That was our first three products that were shipped out of our garage.”

Why manufacture in Iowa

To start, Taylored Expressions outsourced its production. One of the companies that was manufacturing those products went out of business, so the VanBruggens bought the manufacturer’s equipment. Owning the production has been a differentiator for the company. When crafters were stuck at home during COVID, Taylored Expressions was able to immediately respond to changing trends and produce new products on the fly. 

Using Lean manufacturing principles, the company is able to produce affordably, replenish their 2,500 SKUs quickly and experiment with new designs without massive minimum orders, Jon VanBruggen said. 

“We don’t have to wait six to eight weeks, we can actually [produce new products] overnight,” he said. “Keeping inventories low but in stock was one of our goals.”

Their ability to quickly respond to trends has made a difference, he said. 

“Many of our competitors, they’ve probably got their Christmas stuff locked in, ready to go. Well, who knows what [trends are] going to evolve over the summer, and for us, we can hop on a trend pretty quickly because we can manufacture ourselves,” he said. 

In 2020, designers created a stamp design to celebrate frontline workers. The plate (to manufacture the new stamp design) was made the next day.

“They overnighted the plate here and we were making the stamps the third day and shipping them out the fourth day,” Jon said. “In less than a week, we went all the way from concepting to shipping, which you just cannot do with outsourcing manufacturing.”

Crafters want to be on cusp of new trends, so quick turnaround is important to Taylored Expressions’ customers. Most orders ship out of the Ankeny facility within 48 hours of purchase. 

“One of the things that we’ve learned about our community of crafters [is] that they love to respond to any needs that arise almost right away, whether it’s the death of a family member, you don’t want to wait for something. When those needs arise, we want to be there to serve our crafters, and we’re able to do that by manufacturing in house,” he said. 

To produce the rubber stamps, the company takes a digital design and transfers it to a magnesium plate with matrix board and rubber is applied. That is then pressed and placed in an oven and later cut into individual stamps. 

The company also works with paper mills to maintain its extensive card stock operation. 

“We’re cutting paper, we’re scoring paper, we are printing on it, folding it, counting it, sorting it, laminating it,” Jon said. 

They also die cut paper with a 70-year-old Hiedelber die cutter they call “Heidi” that is used to create kits for customers.

The company has been minimally affected by tariffs, Jon said. Some, but not the bulk, of the materials used in production are sourced from Asia. Having multiple product lines has allowed the company to diversify and  balance the effects of those changes. 

“I love roller coasters as much as anyone else but what I really love about roller coasters is that they have seatbelts,” he said. “We expected some volatility coming so we prepared our seatbelts for that. We knew some tariffs were coming, we didn’t know what they would be, including 145%, but we were prepared and were able to absorb some of that impact.”

Stamp of approval

While the company manufactures out of its Ankeny location, the building also features a design hub for creating new products and shooting crafting live casts and videos, as well as a store and art studio with regular crafting events for customers. 

Taylored Expressions is invested in a culture of transparency, creativity and creating joy, the VanBruggens said. Near the break room is a thank you board where employees can leave notes and special coins for one another. There is also a feedback board where employees can suggest business changes, such as how the manufacturing process operates. 

They often ask themselves how they can bring more joy to their customers and from those conversations they have developed new products, such as a multi-card sample maker and ink-blending brushes. 

“[The designers] go about just prototyping stuff like, ‘Let’s try this,’ or ‘Let’s try that.’ It’s kind of fun to get in this creative space where those questions are continuing to swirl around,” Jon said. 

“Designing to solve problems is where we’ve seen a lot of our innovation and success come from,” Taylor added. 

The company also regularly hosts Stamp Joy, a crafting event at the Iowa Events Center. At this year’s event, Oct. 9-11, attendees can learn new crafting skills, take part in workshops, shop and more.