Where It All Began
Jo Froud Design Studio isn't my first creative business, not even my second. Before any of this, there was a little Etsy shop selling hand-sewn felt decorations and cut and layered greeting cards, made with love and an awful lot of patience. It taught me that I could sell things I'd made with my hands. It also taught me that there were limits to how far that particular path could take me.
Dolly and Fred came next, and that's where everything changed.
It was with Dolly and Fred that I properly learned to draw. That I put my own artwork onto prints and then stationery, building a brand focused on bright, bold, joyful design for children. I was tired of seeing grey in children's spaces, that relentless, muted aesthetic that had somehow become the default. I wanted something different. Something that celebrated colour and joy without tipping into clutter. Something rooted in affirmation, in biblical truth, in the belief that the spaces children inhabit shape the way they see themselves and the world.
Over seven years, Dolly and Fred found its way into thousands of homes. My prints hang on the walls of churches and paediatric units in the US and across the UK, in places where people go when life is hard, when they need hope, when they need reminding that beauty still exists. I don't take that lightly. I never will.
The Tension
The seed of change was planted earlier than I'd like to admit.
When I first stepped into the world of surface pattern design, I joined The Creative Powerhouse Society, hosted by Stacy Bloomfield. In one of the early trainings, she talked about how her own creative focus had evolved, how she'd started creating artwork for children because her children were little, and how her work had grown and shifted as they grew. I remember sitting with that and feeling something stir. I could already feel myself at the beginning of that same transition. And it niggled away at me for years.
I tried to do both for a while. But letting go of a successful business, one I was so incredibly proud of, was one of the hardest things I've faced creatively. There was the practical fear of lost income. And then there was something deeper: the worry that in closing Dolly and Fred I was somehow closing the chapter of my life when my children were small. That business was born in that season. It carried the heart of it.
But here's what I've come to understand. Drawing is deeply personal. There is a real emotional connection to what we create, and that connection has to come from somewhere true. When my children were little, my inspiration lived in their world, in Duplo zoos and wooden train tracks spread across the living room floor. That world was full and real, and it fed everything I made.
That world has shifted now. We don't build train tracks anymore. We go outside. We watch birds. We press our faces close to flowers and stand on clifftops with binoculars. And that, that is where my creativity lives now. The moment I stopped resisting that truth and let go of what no longer fit, my creative output grew in ways I hadn't imagined possible.
The Turning Point
Last summer we relocated to the Humber Estuary, and something in me shifted that I hadn't expected.
It wasn't one single moment. It was a series of dominoes, each one nudging the next. A new landscape to explore. Children who no longer needed me in the same way, who were finding their own independence and their own world. A slower pace. A different light. The sense that seeds planted a long time ago were finally, quietly, coming into bloom.
I've always believed that God's timing is not my timing, and this move felt less like a decision we made and more like an arrival we were led to. The estuary, the coastline, the hedgerows full of birdsong - it all spoke to something in me that had been waiting to be heard. And somewhere in that stillness, the resistance I'd been carrying for years simply fell away.
The path forward became clear. It was time.
The Decision
When the moment finally came, it was both terrifying and the most enormous relief.
I'd spent a long time fighting to keep Dolly and Fred going, pushing through, showing up, trying to find the spark. But looking back honestly, I had barely created for almost a year. Not because life was too busy, but because the well had run dry. The passion that had built that business had quietly, gently moved on. And I think part of me had known that for a long time.
The book that finally lit the match was Believe Bigger by Marshawn Evans Daniels. It's a book about calling, about how our purpose isn't always a single destination but something that evolves and shifts as we grow. Reading it felt like someone had put language to something I'd been carrying without words. I prayed a lot during that season. I asked for clarity, for courage, for confirmation that what I was feeling was real and not just fear dressed up as direction.
The answer kept coming back the same.
I also leaned heavily into personal development during this time, books that challenged me, that pushed me forward, that reminded me that staying small out of fear is its own kind of loss. Slowly, the resistance dissolved. And one day, the decision that had felt impossible for two years simply felt inevitable.
I closed Dolly and Fred with gratitude, with grief, and with genuine excitement for what came next.
The New Chapter
Jo Froud Design Studio is not a reinvention. It's a homecoming.
The coastline, the garden, the hedgerows, the clifftops, this is the world I actually live in, the one that fills me up and spills back out as pattern. For the first time in my creative life, my work is rooted entirely in my own experience, my own wonder, my own faith. That feels like freedom.
I'll be honest, I've never been someone who maps out five-year plans. I live in the now, in the next five minutes, in the next collection. But I do have hopes. I hope my patterns find their way onto products throughout the home, licensed with brands who share a love of the natural world and beautiful things. I hope the artwork continues to grow and evolve as I do. And I hope that somewhere along the way it does for others what creating does for me.
This autumn I'm launching my first product line, starting with a calendar or two, and hopefully prints and mugs to follow. Small beginnings. But beginnings nonetheless.
More than anything, I hope my work is more than colour on a page. I hope it offers what I set out to create: a restorative breath, a feeling evoked, and a moment in time that allows us to move on to the next step with a little bit more peace, strength and courage.
That's what Dolly and Fred gave to others in its season. And that's what Jo Froud Design Studio is here to do now.
With love,
Jo x
