Move over, Lisa Frank! New Baton Rouge-based lifestyle brand Sweet Lane provides colorful stickers and stationery with a sweet twist for girls and moms.
Sweet Lane promotes positivity through a line of notes, affirmation cards, creative kits and glimmering, waterproof stickers based on original candy art made by the brand’s founders Jeanne McCollister McNeil and Lauren Stewart Haddox. (Editor’s note: McNeil is the daughter of Rolfe McCollister, an original co-founder of 225.)
Sweet Lane began last February and will officially launch at the Atlanta Market in January 2025. It has also created partnerships with Baton Rouge shops like The Keeping Room and Tangerine to showcase its current collection to local customers and to finalize product development before the line officially launches next year.
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“We always talked about being in business together,” McNeil says. “We want to create a product line that really uplifts and encourages.”
Sweet Lane’s products started out as a hodgepodge of confectionaries. The result is a candy-coated color palette that McNeil and Haddox pieced together to create mosaic portraits of sweet tigers wearing fondant sunglasses with licorice whiskers and striped fur made up of Sixlets, M&M’s and lots and lots of sprinkles. The original candy art canvases are covered with epoxy resin before being photographed and converted into digital files. The tigers are then added to colorful, watercolor backgrounds before going onto Sweet Lane’s stationery cards, stickers and other products.
“We’ve never seen candy art,” McNeil says. “It’s unique. It’s different. And one of the things we were trying to do is identify something that was more unique.”
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, can you eat it? Do you eat the sticker?’” Haddox adds. “No, (the candy) is our medium. That’s what we use to create our art.”
McNeil and Haddox have developed different variations of their candy tigers. Each design is named after people who are close to them, like nieces, sisters and even Haddox’s favorite Office Depot worker.
“We started with a tiger, the shape of Louisiana, butterflies, Taylor Swift and a tennis racket,” Haddox says about their initial designs. “We probably had 10 different designs. We asked people for feedback, and everyone was drawn to that star-eyed tiger.”
The brand’s name, Sweet Lane, combines the ideas of its candy-based design with the name of McNeil’s 9-year-old daughter, Lane. The logo is modeled off of the stripes of twisted lollipops, too. It’s intended for girls aged 8 to 18 and moms. Product highlights include creative kits containing purses, journals, or tumblers and stickers to customize them with, as well as packs of first-person affirmation cards and rhinestone tape that can be used to tack the cards onto mirrors. McNeil and Haddox believe items like these can help girls in their preteen to teen years boost their confidence and can even be beneficial for their mothers, too.
“‘I am enough.’ ‘I am blessed.’ ‘I will reach my dreams,’” Haddox reads some of the affirmations out loud. “You really can change your thought process.”
McNeil and Haddox have gone through a lot of testing to ensure their products’ quality and to see what items are in demand. This meant ordering countless prototypes, hosting feedback parties and even scrapping ideas. They first set out to make acrylic trays with swappable art inserts and large scrapbooking kits, but the duo decided to focus on other items after gauging the interest of Sweet Lane’s target audience.
Susan Holliday, owner of Tangerine, says Sweet Lane’s vibrant display has drawn a lot of attention in her store.
“We love the inspiring messages, creativity and promotion of individuality of Sweet Lane,” Holliday says. “Not to mention how special it is for us to team up with a local company.”
But, stationery and stickers are just the start for Sweet Lane, McNeil and Haddox say. As it gets more established, the founders hope to build a full lifestyle brand, adding more collections and lines, including apparel, home decor, luxury bags and more. Sweet Lane will soon launch memory box kits, which can be decorated and filled with stickers, affirmation cards and other keepsakes.
McNeil says she and Haddox have no shortage of inspiration. So much so that they have a fun way of talking each other down from ideas that seem too ambitious for the brand in its current infancy.
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“‘Hot tamale’ is actually our code word for each other,” McNeil laughs. “If we start going with new ideas and someone says ‘Alright, hot tamale,’ it means shut it down, write it down and we will come back to it.”
McNeil and Haddox will host pop-ups with a sticker bar to connect Sweet Lane with local customers and test the products further. The next Sweet Lane Sticker Bar pop-up is this Sunday, Sept. 29, from 2–5 p.m. at the University Club Clubhouse. A Swiftie-themed Sticker Bar with exclusive Taylor Swift-inspired candy art stickers will be held at Tangerine on Saturday, Oct. 19, from 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Follow Sweet Lane on Instagram for brand updates, product drops and future Sticker Bar dates.