How a Journal Company Finds Inspiration with Gemini to Create Journals that Connect Generations

My best friend, Stephanie, and I were both stay-at-home moms, each with three kids the same ages, living in the same neighborhood. We were always dabbling in different ventures, and I had an Etsy shop selling paper goods like stationery and birthday cards. One day, Stephanie suggested we figure out a way to streamline what I was up to with the shop and expand it into something bigger. My first thought was, “That's adorable.” I hate business, but I love to make things. So, she proposed a deal: She’d handle the business side, and I would do the creative. It was a perfect partnership. Our husbands jumped into the business, too, and just like that, it was a true family affair.

We launched Duncan & Stone in February of 2020 with our first line of parenthood journals, and then the world shut down. We panicked. We had just put a nest egg into this baby business. But a funny thing happened. Stuck at home, everyone decided to catch up on the baby books they never started. It turned out to be a wildly successful first push.

We started by fulfilling every order out of our garage, with all hands on deck all the time. After about two and a half years, we took a big leap and moved to a fulfillment center. It was a lifesaver. It freed us up from packing boxes so we could focus on running the company and expanding our product line. My goal was to have a journal for everybody, no matter their life stage, connecting families and generations through the art of the handwritten story.

As the main creative, I used to spend countless hours on market research, using products like Google Trends to see what people were searching for. It gave me the data, but it didn't give me the why. That all changed when I started using Gemini to do market research for our fall product line.

It’s easy for me to get caught in my own perspective, but Gemini helped me tune into the general population and know if I was going in the right direction for our customers.

Then once I figured out my direction and created a template, I uploaded it to Gemini and asked what was missing. It came back with brilliant suggestions. Once I was finished with the book, I sent it back to Gemini once more to help me edit and proofread everything.

We’re also using Gemini to grow our community of creators. Finding the right people to showcase our products used to mean searching through millions of profiles. Now, we can tell Gemini the kind of content creator we're looking for, and we’ll get back a curated list of creators who are a perfect match for our brand.

On the business side, Google’s AI-powered Performance Max ad campaigns have been huge for our business, always outperforming everything else.

As small business owners, we’re responsible for everything. Having Gemini and Performance Max makes us more efficient and lets us do so much more for our customers. It’s exciting to have these tools at our fingertips as we continue to grow.