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Business & Tech

On the Job: She Scrapped Her Career and Launched a New Life

For years, Eva Smith worked for financial institutions. But when the rules changed, and the companies crashed, she made a drastic change in her life, buying Santee's Scrappin' Attack store with her daughter

The world of high finance and the hobby of scrapbooking seem as far apart as Albania and Australia.

One is about pressure, performance and business suits, with a focus on the bottom line. The other is about reflection, relaxation and cutting bits of colored paper, with a focus on preserving memories.

If it appears they have nothing in common, well that’s just what Eva Smith hoped for.

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Three years ago she ejected from the financial industry after more than 35 years, leaving her job as a vice president and operations manager of a San Diego firm to parachute into a new life as co-owner and operator of a scrapbook store with her daughter, Stacie Riley.

For Smith it was like stepping off a tall building toward a better, more enjoyable life – and trusting there was a net to catch her.

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The net was , the Santee store she and her daughter own and operate, as well as work that makes her happy, not torn up inside.

“The company I was working with had started to downsize and was going through all this, and I walked in and told my boss, ‘I’ll be leaving and you tell me what the timeline is that works for you,’ and he said, ‘You’re kidding.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I spent the last few years laying off people and, you know, ‘right-sizing.’ No matter how you say it, it’s still not a pleasant job.

“We bought a scrapbook store, so I’m going to Santee to cut paper and have some fun… It was the right time to walk away.”

The transition

Today, Smith spends her days in their store in Santee’s selling scrapbooks, accessories, picture frames and paper. She helps customers find just the right pieces to go with themes for their books – weddings, trips and children, for instance – and teaches classes about how to use materials and equipment to get the best results.

She’s enjoyed the life transition so much, that when the lease on their store recently came up for renewal, she and Stacie signed up for three more years.

Operating the store has been rewarding and spending time with people who share her scrapbooking interests has been a pleasure.

“Wonderful, wonderful people walk into this store and everybody has a story,” she says. “And they’re just looking for an opportunity to share that story, and they get the opportunity in here.

“It’s completely different from having a regional territory, and pratically living in the car and thinking 10 steps ahead of the step I’m on right now, to just being able to help someone match paper. And for that moment in time, they’re like, ‘That’s perfect! You’re so good at this.’ ”

There are very few stores in the county devoted just to scrapbooking. Smith knows of hers, plus others in Poway and Vista. There are a few others that sell scrapbooking supplies, but those stores sell other items, too. Because of that, Scrappin’ Attack gets customers from all over the county.

The store is full of items to complement photos, cards and mementoes that people want to preserve in scrapbooks. Varieties of backgrounds, titles, borders, logos and stickers fill the room, along with papers that can be cut to any shape on the store’s Cricut cutting machine.

Smith describes what they do in scrapbooking as “creative memory keeping.”

“It’s all those events we have in our lives that we go to the trouble of taking pictures of and documenting somehow,” she says. “Taking that information and putting it into a form that people can enjoy. I tell people it doesn’t need to be every picture. Just the essence of it. We went to Yellowstone, here’s a handful of pictures to tell you that.”

Family business

Mother and daughter have worked out a system to running their business.

Smith, who lives in Allied Gardens with her husband, spends more time in the shop running the daily operation. Her daughter, who has two small children, comes in just a couple of times per week from her home in Alpine. From there, she’s able to update and manage the store’s website, handle emails, manage the ordering and keep the store stocked.

Riley, who’s 34, has been working with her mom in various capacities since she was a teen, and they’ve been scrapbooking together since the early ’90s. So, working together at the store, Smith says, “Isn’t unusual. We’ve got a pretty good working relationship as a mother and daughter.”

All Smith’s years in the financial world, managing profit and loss, has come to be invaluable in operating her own store.

“I tell our customers in the store, this is their hobby but it’s my business,” she says.

It was their work together as hobbyists, though, that launched Smith’s career change. She and her daughter – who first learned scrapbooking from a neighbor -- enjoyed the time they spent together, creating scrapbooks and documenting their lives.

Smith found it both fun and fascinating – and believes it’s important to document people and events.

Her message to customers is to preserve the legacy of family heritage.

“There are too many times the pictures stay in a box,” she says. “And then the owner of those pictures is that generation that maybe didn’t tell all the stories, and unfortunately the next generation that gets the box doesn’t know what to do with it. They can sort out some of the people, but the ones they can’t end up being pictures they just throw away or give away.

“If you walk into antique stores and thrift shops you’ll see boxes of old pictures. That’s somebody’s family. And now they’re selling them for 25, 30 cents. So I always ask customers, ‘Have you done that box of pictures that your mother or grandmother left you? Have you taken the time to do that?

“After that, it’s all about the fun. The paper crafting, making the cards, doing all the fun things you enjoy.”

Souring on finance

Smith, who admits to passing age 50 but not yet hitting 60, calls herself an Army brat who first moved to San Diego in the mid 1960s with her family. She went to Hoover High and then San Diego State before embarking on her career in finance.

For most of her life, she enjoyed it, yet a few years ago it began to wear on her. She witnessed what she calls the “self-inflicted wound” administered by financial institutions, which led to , business failures, recession and layoffs. She used to tell her husband and daughter she planned to work into her 70s, but she changed her mind as traditional rules governing stability in her profession – such as people needing income and collateral to qualify for loans – were tossed aside.

“I told my boss it was all smoke and mirrors, and it was going to blow up,” she recalls. “When you walk away from rules and structure, it’s not for the good…

“My goodness, the snowball got bigger and bigger.”

It was, she says, an opportunity for chaos, and when she finally couldn’t take it any more, she decided to get into something that made her feel good.

She turned the page and opened a new book, buying Scrappin’ Attack.

No doubt the photos she now sets aside to preserve have a few more smiling faces on them.

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