About Roots and Ties
About Roots and Ties
Roots and Ties started as a school project.
Our son was assigned a challenge: build a business, and pitch it at the end of the year for a chance to bring it to market. We sat down as a family to brainstorm — not just any idea, but one that would actually show up as him. He's always loved history, especially the strange, overlooked details most people never learn. And he has a big heart.
The postcard idea came early. Using AI felt like the right thread to pull — a way to connect the past to the present, and point it toward the future. His love of obscure, rare facts became the engine of the whole project: the research he did for fun became the backbone of what's now our blog, turning a school assignment into something genuinely useful to other people too.
The original idea was simple and personal: inspirational postcards, from one Black man to another. The messages were pre-written on purpose — a way to help put feelings into words when the right words don't always come easy. Once we landed on the figures and the layout, we started building for real.
We chose print-on-demand early, on purpose — it let us stay small and focused while we found our footing, instead of getting buried in operations before we even knew if the idea would resonate.
Lineage came next, almost naturally — the same idea, but for our daughter. Different history, same heart.
Along the way, we hit real obstacles. Our first designs used photos of the actual figures, but copyright kept getting in the way, and licensing wasn't in the budget for a school project turned small business. So we pivoted — using stock imagery instead, since we already had a paid design subscription. But thinking further ahead, we realized that wouldn't hold up for real commercial use either. So we pivoted again — further this time. We stopped borrowing images altogether and started designing our own.
That decision changed the whole project. Instead of illustrating a person, we started asking what shaped them — and built a symbol system, our Visual Key, to represent it. It solved our copyright problem, but it gave us something better too: a fresh way to look at history, one built from the ground up, entirely our own.
At the Pitch Contest that started it all, he won.
That's still the spirit behind everything we make — a family project that grew up, carried forward by curiosity, a few hard pivots, and the belief that history is worth telling differently.
Continuum
Continuum carries this into the stories of Black men whose intellect, labor, and vision built the systems we still live inside today.
Lineage
Lineage carries this into the stories of Black women whose care, courage, and authorship shaped generations, often without the credit history gave them.
Each collection lives across postcards, art, and everyday objects — meant to be held, sent, worn, and kept, not just looked at once and forgotten. Every piece includes a link back to the fuller story, because we believe the people behind these symbols deserve more than a caption.
Source & Sanctuary and Anchor & Presence
Two more lines are already taking shape — Source & Sanctuary, honoring motherhood, and Anchor & Presence, honoring fatherhood — and we're taking the time to give them the same care before bringing them into the world.
"Which ones represent you in the Continuum?" — that question sits at the center of everything we make. We hope, somewhere in these stories, you find a piece of your own.