FOUNDER — Tia Masic launched Hemlock & Oak with the goal of distrupting the plastic-laden, environmentally-overlooked stationery industry while designing mindful products that would encourage value-centered living.

After learning that most "faux leathers" and other stationery items (including paper) contained plastic, she decided to research and support new and upcoming materials to better change the industry. Her goal is to eventually have Hemlock & Oak become a closed-loop company.

As a result, Hemlock & Oak has grown into a community of thousands of planner and stationery aficionados.

Her day-to-day chaos includes a bit of everything and anything, including wrestling with indesign to make said planners, developing and coding the website and apps, organizing business ops, proofreading thousands of pre-press pages, doing art or content when she can, and surviving the daily fires that come with owning a business.

OPERATIONS — George Sarnetsky joined Tia to help operate Hemlock & Oak during a pivotal moment of growth, helping to build it from the ground up. He helped turn its sustainability mission into an operational reality, proving that thoughtful stationery could be made responsibly, right here in Canada.

As COO, he oversees the details most companies outsource: local manufacturing, plastic-free packaging, and supply chains held to the same environmental standard as the products themselves.

Behind every planner that reaches a customer's hands is his coordination and effort that helps us make the products.

CUSTOMER CARE, ARTIST — Jess Couture wears two hats at Hemlock & Oak: the illustrator behind our exclusive sticker collections, and the friendly voice on the other side of your emails.

A Vancouver-based illustrator and painter, she fills every sheet with hand-drawn, nature-inspired whimsy. Playful icons and little moments of soft magic designed to make planning feel less like a chore and more like play.

That same care carries into customer support, where no question is too small and every parcel matters. If an email from us ever brightened your day, it was probably Jess!

GRAPHIC DESIGN & MANUFACTURING — Sanjana is where our stickers stop being drawings and start being things. Artists supply the whimsy, then Sanjana brings it into the physical world! Printing, colour-matching, and precision-cutting every sheet right here in-house.

Her days are a juggling act of inks, materials, and a fleet of Graphtec cutting plotters that, frankly, behave for her and no one else. Calibrating them is equal parts science and diplomacy, and she's fluent in both. If our stickers always seems to restock just in the nick of time, that's because Sanjana is constantly trying to keep ahead of your cart.

She's also a certified helping hand with content, as well as on the warehouse floor, jumping in on pack days whenever launch season gets loud.

At home, quality assurance is handled by her cat DeeDee, who firmly believes every freshly printed sticker sheet is a cat bed, and tests them accordingly.

TECH AND ENGINEERING — Marc is the reason everything you just clicked... worked. Our website, our behind-the-scenes applications, the webhooks and architecture humming behind every order: all of it runs through Marc, our resident developer and all-around digital problem-solver.

His job is a strange one: when he does it perfectly, it looks like nothing happened at all. Pages load, labels print, and thousands of planner-lovers shop in peace, blissfully unaware of the small storms he's calmed behind the scenes. A pre-order launch-day traffic spike is his version of extreme sports.

While most of our team works in paper, Marc works in code. Every tool he builds in-house is one less thing we outsource and keeps our small team fiscally nimble and as independent as possible.

He remains the only member of the team whose work you cannot hold in your hands, and the only one who can fix the label printer by looking at it sternly for two hours.

WAREHOUSE & FULFILLMENT — Jenn is the reason your order shows up at your door looking like a gift! As our warehouse coordinator, she runs the busiest corner of Hemlock & Oak: receiving fresh planner shipments from our Ontario printer, keeping the shelves in perfect order, and hand-packing your parcels.

She's also the keeper of our inventory: the one who always knows exactly how many of each colour are left, what's running low, and where that one mystery box wandered off to. Plastic-free packaging sounds simple until you realize none of it is automated. Every order is packed by human hands, and most of the time those hands are Jenn's.

She's occasionally assisted by her dog Billy, our unofficial Chief Woof Officer, who accepts payment exclusively in treats and supervises pack days. His quality control standards are rigorous, although his attendance record is not.

If your order ever arrived tucked, taped, and wrapped just right: that was Jenn. If it somehow arrived with a little extra joy inside, Billy would like you to know he helped.