Thelma & Lou: Friendship Without Distance

Some friendships are built around convenience.

You live close to one another. You see each other all the time. Your lives naturally overlap.

And then there are friendships that simply become part of who you are.

That is the friendship between Pamela and Kerrie—Thelma and Lou.

Long before ThelmaLou Creations grew into the business it is today, before Empowered Prints, before the equipment, orders, websites, customers, deadlines, and big dreams, there was a friendship.

And through moves, milestones, heartaches, ridiculous adventures, hundreds of miles, and more laughter than either of us could possibly count, that friendship has remained the glue holding everything together.

Then Pamela Moved 365 Miles Away

At some point, life changed.

Pamela moved to California.

Suddenly, there were approximately 365 miles between Thelma and Lou.

For some friendships—and certainly some business partnerships—that kind of distance might have changed everything.

For us, it really didn't.

Sure, we don't get to see each other nearly as often as we would like. There aren't regular lunches or quick visits. We can't just pop over to talk through an idea or spend an afternoon working together.

But somehow, the friendship and the business continued.

The phone calls continued.

The ideas continued.

The laughter continued.

The support continued.

And ThelmaLou continued.

Because 365 miles can change how often you are physically in the same room, but it doesn't have to change how close you are.

And When We Do Get Together...

We make it count.

There are certain stories that probably don't need to be shared publicly in too much detail.

But let's just say there are memories involving a broom and a ceiling fan.

There was Pam's first BBQ cooking experience.

There was getting stuck in a bathroom window.

Yes. A bathroom window.

And there have been countless other moments that started with one of us thinking something was a perfectly reasonable idea and ended with both of us laughing until we couldn't breathe.

Those are the memories that don't show up in business plans.

They aren't listed on our website.

They don't fit neatly into a mission statement.

But they are every bit as much a part of the story of ThelmaLou as anything we have ever created.

Because before we were business partners, we were friends.

And after all these years, we still know how to laugh together.

But Friendship Isn't Only About the Laughter

We have also walked beside each other through some incredibly difficult moments.

There have been deaths in our families.

There have been heartbreaks, struggles, worries, disappointments, and moments when life felt incredibly heavy.

And we have been there.

Sometimes friendship isn't about having the perfect words.

Sometimes there aren't any words.

Sometimes it is simply knowing that there is a person 365 miles away who will answer the phone.

Someone who knows your history.

Someone who has seen you at your best and your worst.

Someone who celebrates your victories without hesitation and hurts with you when life doesn't go according to plan.

We have shared grief.

But we have also shared incredible joy.

We've celebrated graduations, accomplishments, family milestones, business victories, and those little moments that might not mean much to anyone else but mean everything to us.

That's what happens when someone stops simply being your friend and becomes part of your family.

Somewhere in the Middle of All of That, We Built a Business

Maybe that's what makes our business partnership a little different.

ThelmaLou wasn't created by two people who met because they wanted to start a company.

It grew out of two people who already cared about each other.

Pamela brought her experience as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and educator, along with her understanding of how individuals learn, develop skills, and grow.

Kerrie brought decades of experience in graphic design, printing, production, marketing, and business development.

Those two worlds eventually came together in a way neither of us could have fully predicted.

ThelmaLou Creations grew.

Then came Empowered Prints and an even bigger mission: creating opportunities for individuals with special needs to learn real job skills, gain confidence, experience meaningful work, and demonstrate what they are capable of accomplishing.

There have been plenty of times when the business has tested us.

There have been crazy ideas, stressful days, difficult decisions, unexpected problems, successes, failures, changes of direction, and probably more than a few conversations that began with:

"Okay, hear me out..."

But underneath all of it has always been the friendship.

The Friendship Is the Glue

Businesses change.

People move.

Life gets busy.

Families grow and change.

Careers evolve.

Plans rarely unfold exactly the way we imagine they will.

And sometimes the person who means the most to you ends up living 365 miles away.

But real friendship finds a way.

We may not see each other often, but when we do, it feels like we pick up exactly where we left off.

We laugh.

We reminisce.

We probably get ourselves into some kind of ridiculous situation.

We talk about our families.

We talk about the business.

We dream about what comes next.

And then we go back to our separate lives in two different states, knowing the bond hasn't changed.

Because at the end of the day, ThelmaLou isn't held together by a business agreement.

It's held together by friendship.

It's held together by years of memories.

By trust.

By shared purpose.

By laughter.

By grief.

By celebrations.

By showing up.

From deaths in our families to graduations.

From business milestones to personal heartbreaks.

From a broom in a ceiling fan to a bathroom window that one of us probably should never have tried climbing through.

We've been there.

And no matter how many miles separate us, we always will be.

Pamela will always be Thelma.

Kerrie will always be Lou.

And somewhere between California and Arizona, between the laughter and the tears, between everything we've already experienced and everything still ahead of us, there will always be this friendship.

Because the business may be something we built together.

But the friendship is the glue that holds us together.

And 365 miles has never been strong enough to break that.

And Someday, We'll Be the Old Ladies Telling These Stories

Sometimes we wonder what ThelmaLou will look like years from now.

Will the business be bigger than we ever imagined?

Will Empowered Prints have helped create opportunities for hundreds of people?

Will there be more equipment, more programs, more employees, more crazy ideas that started with one of us saying, "Okay, hear me out..."?

We hope so.

We hope we can look back and see that something we started together made a difference. That we created opportunities where they didn't exist before. That we helped people discover abilities they didn't know they had. That we built something our families can be proud of.

But someday, the orders won't matter quite as much.

The deadlines won't seem so important.

The equipment we stressed over will probably have been replaced three times.

And whatever ThelmaLou eventually becomes, there will still be Thelma and Lou.

We like to imagine ourselves years from now—older, hopefully wiser, although based on our history that part is questionable—sitting together and telling the same stories we've told a hundred times before.

We'll still laugh about the broom in the ceiling fan.

We'll still bring up Pam's first BBQ cooking experience.

Someone will inevitably tell the bathroom window story again.

And we'll probably argue over whose version of each story is actually correct.

There will be new stories by then, too.

More graduations.

More celebrations.

More people we have watched grow.

More business adventures.

More mistakes that eventually became funny.

More losses that we helped each other through.

More moments when one of us needed the other and didn't have to ask twice.

Because growing old together doesn't necessarily mean living down the street from each other.

Sometimes it means simply continuing to show up through every version of each other's lives.

We have already watched each other change.

We've watched our children grow.

We've watched careers change, families change, priorities change, and dreams evolve.

We've celebrated each other's victories and sat with each other through heartbreak.

And hopefully, many years from now, we'll get to look back at everything we built and say:

"Can you believe we actually did all of that?"

Maybe ThelmaLou will look completely different by then.

Maybe Empowered Prints will have grown beyond anything we can currently imagine.

Maybe the ideas we're dreaming about today will become things we haven't even thought possible yet.

But there is one thing we hope never changes.

Us. The friendship underneath all of it.

Because long after the last shirt is printed, the last order is packed, and the last machine is turned off, the greatest thing to come from this journey won't be something we made or sold.

It will be the life we shared along the way.

The ridiculous memories.

The tears.

The accomplishments.

The phone calls across 365 miles.

The times we showed up for each other's families.

The laughter that made our stomachs hurt.

The moments when life wasn't funny at all, and we simply stayed beside each other.

That's the real story of ThelmaLou.

Two women who became friends.

Two friends who became family.

Two very different people who somehow figured out how to build something pretty incredible together.

And someday, when we're two old ladies sitting around laughing about all of this, we'll probably realize that ThelmaLou was never just the name of our business.

It was the name of an adventure we took together.

Pamela will always be Thelma.

Kerrie will always be Lou.

And no matter how many miles, years, changes, successes, failures, celebrations, or heartaches come between where we started and where we eventually end up...

We'll still be Thelma and Lou.

And hopefully, we'll still be getting ourselves into just enough trouble to give us something new to laugh about.

Written by:
Kerrie Mallory-Thompson
AKA: “Lou”
Co-Founder/Co-Owner