Some brands start from a place of perfect planning and big dreams, and sometimes we wish we could say Friend was built the same way. But if it was, it probably wouldn't be us.
Friend actually came during a time when Lana felt lost. She was living overseas in America as a brand new working mum, trying to hold onto the pieces of herself that still felt important. Somewhere along the way she'd started believing that letting go of those pieces meant she was no longer relevant. We talk a lot about identity when we talk about Friend because that's where the story really starts. Having your identity quietly stripped away in those early days of motherhood can be difficult, especially when we're brought up in a world where so much of our value is tied to what we do.
About a year later, COVID hit and the world shut down. Motherhood had already changed everything, but then her husband was deployed on active combat duty for nine months while she stayed behind in America. At the same time, she was still working for an Australian company, which meant 2am emails and a constant pressure that didn’t quite match the reality of her life, but still felt impossible to escape. It slowly became too much. The anxiety kept building until Christmas Eve, when she decided enough was enough, quit her job, and decided that same day she was going to grow her own food.
Yes, it sounds chaotic. It was. There wasn’t some neat, logical progression here—just a breaking point followed by a decision that felt like it might give her something back. If you know Lana, you’ll understand that instinct to just start, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense yet.
There was just one tiny problem: she knew absolutely nothing about gardening, and she didn’t even have a backyard.
So, like any completely reasonable person, she bought everything she needed anyway and filled the rooftop with containers instead. Turns out you don't technically need a garden to start gardening. You do, however, need somewhere to write everything down.
As she taught herself, she wanted to keep track of what she had planted, what worked, what did not, when things needed harvesting, and all the small notes she thought she would remember next season. So, like anyone with a brain that insists on remembering everything except the important bits, she went looking for a gardening notebook, assuming someone had already made one. She expected it would be easy to find something that worked, but nothing quite felt right.
And that's when she pulled out a blank bullet journal, but after redrawing the same layouts over and over it became more work than the actual gardening. So, in true Lana fashion, she designed one herself and had it printed.
What began as simple problem solving turned into something more. Once she'd made a gardening notebook, she started cooking with everything she was growing, and naturally wanted somewhere to keep recipes. Then they started travelling again, and she wanted somewhere to collect those memories too. Every hobby over the next year somehow ended with another notebook because every time she went looking for one, she couldn't quite find what she wanted. So she kept making them.
Looking back, those notebooks quietly became part of rebuilding her life. They gave her somewhere to learn, somewhere to make mistakes, somewhere to collect ideas and memories, and somewhere that belonged entirely to her. They became companions through a season where she was slowly figuring out who she was again, outside of work, outside of expectations, and outside of feeling like she constantly had to prove her value through what she achieved. That's why they're called Friend.
Not because she thought it sounded nice, and definitely not because she spent months in a boardroom trying to come up with a clever brand name. They'd simply become companions through a season where she needed them, and Friend was the only name that ever felt right.
That feeling carried through when it came time to share them with others. When Lana listed her first notebook on Etsy, she had absolutely no idea what she was getting herself into. She chose the name Creators Friend as a simple way to bring all the different notebooks she wanted to offer under one umbrella. At the time, it wasn’t overthought. She simply believed that if she’d been looking for something like this and couldn’t find it, maybe someone else was too.
Lana was right, but she couldn't have anticipated that they wouldn't just be notebooks for the people who found them. They weren't just places to jot their thoughts and ideas down onto paper. They became companions, just as they did for her. And as she was discovering all these facets of herself, she wasn't looking at the notebooks as the ecosystems you might see on our page today. The beautiful thing is that they came later, shaped by how the community interacted with us, what they asked for, and the collections of notebooks they began to build for themselves, just as Lana did.
Looking back now, it's funny how accidental the whole thing was. Friend wasn't built because someone wanted to sell stationery.
It was built because one woman quit her job, decided to grow vegetables on a rooftop she probably had no business turning into a garden, couldn't find a notebook she liked, and accidentally made one that thousands of other people had been looking for too.
And while that might sound like the end of the story, it was really just the beginning of something that kept growing in ways no one could have ever expected. And as it grew, it slowly became something bigger than Lana could manage on her own. Before long, Nat — Lana’s sister-in-law — stepped in to help, and together they began figuring things out as they went, without really knowing where it would lead.
