Where Arcana Lane comes from

On Queen’s Day, more than twenty years ago, I was browsing one of the street markets in Scheveningen when I bought this old tarot deck for a few euros. I had no idea then that this small moment would become a thread running through everything that followed.

I went on to study tarot, completed the course with a nine out of ten, and then read every book on tarot I could get my hands on. Mark encouraged me to keep going, even when I had no idea where it might lead. That’s how Tarotgesprek began.

Standing still is moving backwards

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that sitting still has never really been my thing. My grandfather always used to say: standing still is moving backwards.

So Mark and I started Loaded ink. Then came Applepiepussy, which later became Applepiepieces and was eventually sold. Atelier Naber is still on the list. SYSO and Happlify followed. And plenty of other things happened along the way.

Every step made sense at the time, even if the pattern only became visible afterwards.

The question that keeps coming back

Last year, a familiar question returned. The kind of question that tends to come up after thirty years of running businesses: what do we want to spend the next few years doing?

Not as some kind of crisis. More as a question that simply presented itself again, in a world that is changing in almost every way.

Loaded ink, SYSO and Happlify would continue. That was never in question. But what could challenge us again, creatively and professionally, on every level at once? That was less obvious.

Everything we’ve already done

Coming up with concepts, developing them and designing them is deeply rooted in who we are. It’s what Loaded ink was built on. Making people happy and spreading positivity is Happlify. Marketing and sales is SYSO.

But somewhere along the way, I had lost the part that was simply about creating. The ideas and jewellery concepts we developed for Applepiepieces. The years I spent illustrating for Fancy magazine through Loaded ink. Painting for Atelier Naber.

Creating something simply for the sake of making it. I missed it, although it took me a while to realise that was what I was missing.

Where it all comes together

Arcana Lane is where all those things meet. What started all those years ago as Tarotgesprek has now grown organically into Arcana Lane.

Tarot reading comes first, because that is what it’s really about: finding clarity through a reading that makes sense. But everything around it - the logo, the branding, the visuals that will play a bigger role as Arcana Lane grows - is our idea and our design.

It is exactly the place where Tarotgesprek, the tarot studies I began twenty years ago and the creativity I had been missing finally come together.

And now it’s here

We’ve spent more than nine months working on Arcana Lane with everything we have, although in reality it has been years in the making.

And now it’s here. We’re launching.

I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me. The same paralysing fear I always feel when starting something new is back, almost every day: No one is going to care about this. What on earth was I thinking?

But that feeling has never been a reason not to do something. If anything, it’s usually a sign that it matters.