Talking About What We Usually Don’t Talk About · Jessica Decola · Blooming Color

At trade shows, we constantly ask each other the same questions.

How are you?

How’s business?

How’s the family?

And the answer is almost always the same: everything’s great.

But is it?

At Loupe Americas in Chicago, Wayne Beckett unexpectedly runs into Jessica DeCola — and there is quite a lot to catch up on.

After almost ten years with GPA, Jessica recently moved to Blooming Color as Director of Brand and Strategic Growth. It’s a move from the supplier side of the industry to the printer side, and one that gives her a new challenge: helping a company that started as the “little printer that could” in Chicago communicate what it has become today — a much larger organization with ambitions well beyond its local market.

Part of Jessica’s role is also looking outside the industry’s usual circles.

Print can easily become an echo chamber, where the same companies, people, markets, and opportunities are discussed again and again. Her job is partly about asking where the opportunities are that printers aren’t currently seeing — and how Blooming Color can position itself differently.

But another important part of Jessica’s story has nothing directly to do with selling print.

She is one of the founders of She*t For Brains, a grassroots mental health and wellness initiative created together with Chris Minn, David Rosendahl, and Jon Bailey.

The idea emerged after a remarkably open and personal moment on stage at Dscoop, where a conversation about business suddenly became a conversation about what people were actually experiencing behind the scenes.

Stress.

Anxiety.

Relationships.

PTSD.

Pressure.

And all the things we rarely discuss when somebody casually asks, “How are you?”

What started as a conversation between four people has developed into webinars, conference sessions, expert discussions, and increasingly open conversations throughout the printing industry.

And now the initiative is heading to PRINTING United Expo with its largest platform yet.

For Jessica and the other founders, this isn’t their day job. It’s something they volunteer their time to because they believe the conversation is needed.

In this INKISH film, Wayne talks with Jessica DeCola about her move to Blooming Color, looking beyond the traditional print echo chamber, She*t For Brains, mental health in our industry, and why sometimes the most important conversation at a trade show has absolutely nothing to do with equipment.

Maybe the next time somebody asks, “How are you?” we should actually listen to the answer.