CINCINNATI — Looking through a round rack of colorful silk scarves, Grey Hall explains to her customer the meaning behind the patterns.
"This one, for example, is Paris," Hall said. "And what I did, it was almost a Rubik's Cube for the brain because I laid it out geographically oriented to the arrondissement."
Her sister, Page Stehlar, then explains why another of Grey's designs (this one of flowers), seems so random.
"She had the flowers arranged just perfectly," Stehlar said. "I said, 'No, they need to be organic — like you dropped the flowers onto the ground.'"
The two sisters make up the company, Grey Hall Designs. Hall is the watercolor artist, spending countless hours designing, drawing and painting the dogs, buildings or designs that populate their signature silk scarves. Stehlar focuses on building the business that has taken off in the past year.
"We're the perfect yin and yang for right now because she does paint and I can keep everything going — build the business, follow up with our accounts, seek new business," Stehlar said.
The business of being creative comes naturally to Hall and Stehlar. Their grandparents were artists. Their mother is also an acclaimed artist and businesswoman.
"My grandmother on my mom's side painted, my grandfather on my dad's side painted and so it's just in the genes," Hall said. "And my mom put a paintbrush in my hand when I was little, and so it's always been something I've been drawn to so it's kind of in the blood."
The sisters remembered the beautiful silk scarves from their mom's closets and decided they could design scarves that reached a new audience.
Hall spends 80 or 90 hours designing and painting the scarves, whether it's for a country club or based on a city. For example, the sisters grew up in Cincinnati, so Hall painted a scarf that features the iconic buildings of her hometown. Even the movement of color around the edges of the design is important, representing the Ohio River.
"I love to bring storytelling onto the watercolor," Hall said. "So if you actually look at the scarf ... each icon, vignette that's painted is correct on a map, but then from a fashion perspective, I rotated it like a cloth so when you wear a scarf it's actually correctly oriented for fashion."
The sisters worked hard to find the right producer of silk scarves that would hand roll the edges and have a quality that mirrored the highest-end scarves they admired. A far cry from their first stab at it, Stehlar said.
"It wasn't what we wanted. We didn't have the hand-rolled edge, but we knew we needed to get it out there. So we got it out there, started selling (and) refined the process," Stehlar said.
Now, their scarf designs are in demand. And they have branched out into jewelry, stationary and even needlepoint designs.
Questions and conversations about whether or not their passion for creating designs and products will become their full-time jobs have started becoming more frequent.
For now, the sisters are content creating and finding new outlets for their designs. And, taking their family tradition to a whole new level.
"We all come by it naturally with the drive to create something," said Stehlar. "And then to leave a legacy. It's something tangible that people can walk away with and love in their homes or on their wrists for years to come. So we like creating something out of nothing that brings people joy."
