Los Angeles, California – November 05, 2026 – Most people have a card they’ve kept for years. It sits in a drawer, or on the fridge, or inside a book they haven’t opened in a while. Fewer people can say when they last sent one.
Maddy Worrell and her best friend started Only Beautifully Written in Los Angeles this year because of that gap. A customer picks a card and types a message on the company’s website. A machine the two founders named Beauty writes the message with a real ballpoint pen. Then the founders address and stamp each envelope and take it to the post office themselves.
The idea came from a pile of cards. Both of the founders have backgrounds in real estate, where agents send a note after every closing. In a busy season those notes wait behind showings, inspections and phone calls.
Research suggests the cards that never get sent matter more than people think. In a 2018 study in Psychological Science, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked people to write letters of thanks and guess how the person receiving them would feel. The writers guessed low. The people who got the letters were more surprised and pleased than the writers expected, and less uncomfortable. They cared about being thanked far more than about the exact words.
Beauty is a pen plotter, a machine that holds an ordinary ballpoint pen and moves it across the card one line at a time, about 20 cards an hour. Because the ink is real, the pen presses into the paper and no two letters come out quite the same. The founders tell people plainly that a machine holds the pen. The words come from the person sending the card. The lettering is based on handwriting, too. Customers choose from 17 handwriting styles, or the company can turn a sample of a customer’s own handwriting into a custom font, so every card goes out in that person’s own handwriting style. The cards can be customized as well, with a business’s logo or its own artwork on the front.
“Nobody has to be talked into the idea that a card matters,” Worrell said. “Everybody has that shoebox. What people don’t have is a free night to sit down and write forty of them. I’d rather someone send the card with Beauty’s help than keep meaning to for another year. And we’re honest that Beauty is a machine. The words are theirs, and the ink is real.”
The company is starting close to home, with real estate agents and brokers around Los Angeles and small businesses that depend on repeat clients and referrals. For many of them, the end of the year is when the thank yous stack up: the clients who bought or sold, the lender who answered a call at nine at night, the past client who sent a friend their way.
Worrell’s advice for those cards is to keep them simple. A thank you works best on its own, she said, without a coupon or a sales pitch tucked inside.
About Only Beautifully Written
Only Beautifully Written is a Los Angeles company that writes and mails cards for people and businesses. It was founded in 2026 by two best friends. Customers type their message online, and Beauty, a pen plotter that holds a real ballpoint pen, writes it in one of 17 handwriting styles or in a custom font made from the customer’s own handwriting. The company’s mission is to keep written notes part of everyday life, because some messages deserve more than a text.
Media Contact
Company Name: Only Beautifully Written
Contact Person: Maddy Worrell, Co-founder
Email: Send Email
City: Los Angeles
State: California
Country: United States
Website: https://onlybeautifullywritten.com