Tellinga

My name is Alex Kurkowski. I am 31 years old, live in Houston, TX, and currently, attend Rice University as an MBA candidate. I started mailing epistolary (literary/artisanal work in the form of letters) style hand-drawn images to friends a family as a joke approximately one year ago. I would draw pictures in story form and mail them out to loved one's piece by piece over a period of time. Imagine a comic or any book with images being taken apart page by page and then those pages snail mailed out one by one throughout weeks or even months! For my friends and family, it was always a way to stay connected and create fun personalized stories so that they could look forward to checking their mailbox every day. My family and friends enjoyed these stories because they were goofy, consistently sent over a period of time, and they were always drawn as the main characters in their own personalized “mailbox movie.” In late 2017, I started my first year at the Rice University MBA program and decided to turn my passion into something that can truly impact the community, so I decided to start Tellinga. Tellinga, LLC is a Houston, TX-based start-up that creates personalized stories with customized illustrations through traditional mail. Story recipients receive hand-drawn stories about themselves based on unique preferences. It can be fun, dramatic, thoughtful... anything! Your mailbox isn't dead - it's more alive than ever! We live in such a digital world these days as we are always emailing, text messaging and following each other’s social media accounts. Tellinga offers a way to tap back into the tangible and traditional by providing a product that you can touch and feel on a deeper level rather than staring at another screen. It provides that old level of eagerness and anticipation of looking forward to checking your mailbox every day. It is the same exciting feeling of when you were exchanging letters with a pen pal or loved one growing up, looking forward to that new monthly/weekly edition of your favorite magazine, or the expectation of a holiday/birthday greeting card. The goal is to provide an extremely personalized gift that brightens a loved one’s day by delivering little hand-drawn story surprises in their mailboxes. Tellinga currently employs 24 talented Houston artists from Rice University and the University of Houston. Young and eager artists now have a new way to express themselves artistically while pursuing a path of personal and economic prosperity. Tellinga is a story about a young start-up that is giving collegiate artists a chance to demonstrate their hard-earned art degrees by creating gifted stories sent through traditional mail. Tellinga artists are compensated for stories completed. Currently eight out of the 24 Tellinga artists have been uniquely featured in the press (see media kit above). More press is in the works. The artists are also featured with a bio and avatar on the Tellinga website. They also have the option of placing their name on each story cardstock to further brand themselves. Each artist's bio can be found online at Tellinga.com.