The Rundown Take
Paper, Passion and Profit: Shawntae Kennebrue Turns a Wedding-Invite Hobby Into SLK Designs
To open the 2024 season of U Talk Winning At The Game Of Life, Devin welcomed Southern California graphic designer Shawntae L. Kennebrue, founder of SLK Designs, for a solo hour built entirely around her business. What started 22 years ago as a search for the right wedding invitations turned into a full design company spanning invitations, banners, memorial booklets and corporate work — and Kennebrue walked the chat through how she built it from a home office with no formal design degree.
Key Takeaways
- Kennebrue is self-taught — no design school — and started SLK Designs in 2002 after designing her own wedding invitations and realizing people wanted to pay her for it.
- Her biggest seller today is custom memorial booklets and obituaries, a line of business that took off during COVID and that she calls her true ministry.
- Standout example: a passport-themed obituary for a client's mother who loved to travel, and a CD-shaped invitation styled like a vinyl record for a minister of music's 60th birthday.
- She caps client revisions at three before charging extra, and she has refunded clients outright when they were disrespectful — "I have a big thing about respect."
- Five-year goal: leave the home office for her own design-and-print studio, go full-time, and build a staff of about ten — including her brother as delivery driver.
Building the Business Solo
Kennebrue described teaching herself Photoshop and Illustrator through YouTube after starting on nothing more than Microsoft Word and Publisher, and she was candid about the cost of staying current — new printers, paper stock, foiling, software subscriptions that eat into margin before a single order ships. She discounts at her own discretion only, never on request, because "me offering someone a discount is basically me paying them to get my product."
Obstacles and Advice
Asked what she'd tell her younger self, Kennebrue pointed to the double hurdle of being a woman and a person of color in a design field she says skews male — including a client who backed out of a deal after learning her business ran out of a home office rather than a storefront. Her answer: let the work speak for itself. Callers Raquel White and Bard peppered her with practical questions on LLCs versus corporations, printer brands and corporate contract work, including a hospital employee-appreciation job that put over 200 custom-printed items in one run.
Devin closed the show thanking Kennebrue for finally making time after nearly a year of trying to book her, and pointed the audience to her Instagram, @SLKDesigns, before teasing next week's guest: stock trader and financial-literacy voice KD O'Neal.