Was it fate or fortune, the story of a little girl from West Coast Berbice who started ‘marking up’ her parents’ walls is now a sought-after designer in the United States, producing merchandise for megastores like Target, high end stores like West Elm, and more?
45-year-old double-major graduate, Ms. Rochelle Porter, continues to push boundaries and reap dividends not from her specific academic acclaim but her passion for art, which was first given expression on the wooden walls of Guyana’s home.
Rochelle’s story and work have been featured in famed magazines such as Essence, Oprah, Ebony, House Beautiful, People; on cable and television such as NBC Today, HGTV; and much more.
Village Voice featured Rochelle a year ago but with continuing phenomenal stories tracking her progress has been rewarding.
Below is her Post-it®️ take on life’s journey, thus far:-
I haven’t done a formal intro in a while, and I’ve been getting several requests to share Rochelle Porter Design‘s origin story. That, of course, is a book that’s still being written. But in case you were wondering how this journey started, here’s a very abridged version of the first couple of chapters (sans the blood, sweat and tears 
)…
I never intended to be a designer. Ever. I graduated college with a double major in English and history and the assumption that I’d end up in academia. Ironically–and to the delight of my Caribbean immigrant parents–I landed a job as a computer programmer at a Fortune 10 company. It was 1999 and Y2K hysteria was in full swing. Desperate to avert the Millennium Bug, big companies were paying big bucks to train “promising liberal arts graduates” like me to add two extra digits to the year in old-school banking software. While initially elated to have guaranteed employment after graduation, I soon realized I hated computer programming.
Though I would never have dared to call myself an artist at the time, I loved art and knew I needed a creative outlet from my respectable-yet-unfulfilling corporate gig. On a whim, I enrolled in a 3-day Intro to Fashion Design course. Day 1 was cool. On the second day, I realized that working in this industry might mean having to produce my design overseas in a “sweatshop”. Immediately, visions of child labor, pollution, and gross human rights violations danced in my head. I didn’t even bother to show up for Day 3. Certain that this cruel industry wasn’t for me, I put my embryonic design dreams on ice.
More than a decade later, I started hearing buzz about sustainable fashion, and learning that ethical sweatshop-free manufacturing was possible. Around the same time, I noticed that the patterns I saw on everyday items in my local Target and Nordstrom looked a lot like the stuff I doodled on Post-it®️ notes while bored at work. I also started getting strange and serendipitous signs everywhere I went (upon opening my passport, a Delta Airlines agent mused that my name “sounded like a clothing line”). I knew I was onto something.
Many, many Google searches, YouTube tutorials, and trade show visits later, I learned that the thing I’d been doing all my life was called “surface pattern design”, and that it was indeed an option for me. Gradually, I figured out how to turn my art into pattern designs that could be sustainably transferred onto products.
I eventually launched my first e-commerce website with a small collection of organic cotton throw pillows bearing my prints, and like that, Rochelle Porter Design was born. We’ve since expanded to other product categories, and we’ve got a LOT more in store (an epic 2023 is in the works).
I count it a privilege to do what I do. The journey thus far hasn’t been easy and I’ve still got a long way to go, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. At the end of the day, I hope my designs make y’all as happy as creating them makes me 
(Source: Rochelle’s letter to subscriber)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eztEkyxfQ9c
