Meet Our Studio Team

Suzanne Maher

CO-FOUNDER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR

With 34 years of breathing creativity, light and love into Affirmations, Suzanne has many positively inspiring projects and products under her belt. As Creative Director, she is involved in the conception and design of all products.

With an eye for detail, sales and symmetry, Suzi ensures every product and visual aspect of the company is pitch-perfect before it makes its way out to enrich and add light to the world.

She sees the world in images, colours and fonts. Indeed, her whole life has been finding words to fit into her myriad of creative ideas. Some people are lucky to find their calling early; in her words, “I have always wanted to be an artist ever since I can remember. I just knew that was my calling from the earliest time. So I told everyone who would listen I was going to be an artist.”

Suzi is passionate about design in all its forms, architecture and interior design. She finds inspiration and wonder in creating and transforming things. For three decades, Affirmations’ design has consistently pushed boundaries.

Suzi loves French films and culture, the colour Indigo and anything Japanese.

Julia Ehemann

PRODUCTION MANAGER

She has headed up Production at Affirmations since 2016 and loves geeking out over head & tail bands, foils, deboss and textured stocks.

Jules is passionate about creativity & community. She loves the buzz of the Affirmations creative studio, and is our International Production guru!

Jules manages our print relationships, and just loves making magic with the other humans in the creative studio!

In her downtime, you can find Jules with her family chasing the best wild swim spots on the East Coast!

Brianna Clarke

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER

In her 6 years with Affirmations, Brianna has worked on a little bit of everything. A genuine all-rounder, whatever she touches, it turns to gold. She also collaborates with artists and authors, and even flexes her own artistic and poetic sides to bring the Affirmations vision to life. There’s a lot of Brianna in all our products.

When not designing products, Bri will be making movies and animations for our social media, creating epic marketing collateral, and in her spare time, you’ll find her doing the technical concept drawings for a new point of sale stand or designing our world-acclaimed catalogues.

Bri loves playing cozy video games, collecting stationery and sleeping in on the weekends.

Ben Eckersley

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Ben is Affirmations’ newest and first male designer to grace the building. A long-time creator and publisher, Ben has fitted into the studio like a glove.

Of course, being a Bellingen local probably helped, and there is no doubt that running the local arts guide on the side played its role. With his calm nature, and dynamic creative gifts, Ben brings a freshness to the creative team.

Affirmations wanted a sweet-natured and colourful personality to create what we call the Sweet Spot. Ben was the man on the spot and has captured a harmonious and original take on type, textures and imagery. These will fly!

Ben loves his kids, good coffee, live music and books... lots of books.

Beth Donson

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

An internationally experienced designer with credits on many fashion and lifestyle magazines, Beth is now Bellingen-based and is the designer behind Affirmations' gorgeous diaries and stationery.

Using her interior and graphic design skills, Beth was tasked with turning traditional wallpaper patterns into a large, luxurious greeting card format. An 'art card', if you will. The Wallpaper Collection is an ambitious collection of greeting cards with a unique flavour.

Beth, in no particular order, loves her boys, her bloke, design, and creating perfect Airbnbs.

Janna Elliott

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR

Janna is our rock-star Editor, drawing on her eternal love of language and grammar. She also works with the Creative Director to develop product content, and still finds time to assist the Production Manager across our print runs and production scheduling.

We have been lucky enough to have her for seven years… She doesn’t know it yet, but we are never letting her go!

While we might call her the resident grammar nerd, she actually feels most at home busting moves in the dance studio or zen-ing out on her yoga mat!