Student Life

There is an unspoken pressure impressed upon college students the moment a student walks onto a college campus during their freshman semester: having a plan. Sometimes this expectation is bestowed upon a student by their parents, themselves, and often times society, pushing the student to make a twenty-year plan post-college and sticking to it. But the truth is that most plans made about one’s future rarely stick to the outline. For Gabrielle Tranel, that reality led to the creation of Paper Leaves: Bookshop and Plant store.

        When Gabrielle attended Southwestern Assemblies of God University, she did not major in Business or Entrepreneurship—instead, Gabrielle chose social work. The choice to be a social work major was prompted by a SAGU Admissions calling her while she was gassing her car, demanding she chooses a degree at that moment. Not knowing how to make a career out of an English degree, Gabrielle chose social work. Upon graduating with her bachelor's from SAGU, she continued her studies at UTA, receiving a master's in social work.

She followed the plan as many other graduates do: finding a job in their degree field and working their way up the ladder. Upon graduating from UTA, Gabrielle began working at a psych ward, helping teens with mental health problems. The longer Gabrielle worked at the psych ward, she began to burn out. She worked long hours without proper compensation and struggled with her own mental health problems. Gabrielle wanted out of the plan, but the thought of leaving her job went against the plan she had crafted for her life.

It is never explicitly taught, but college graduates feel they must stick to their plan before realizing the world prefers to avoid confining itself to schedules. There is a dangerous stigma that if one does not work in the field they earned their degree in, they are deemed failures—wasting money and a college degree on other pursuits.

However, in the same way, Gabrielle was asked to choose her degree plan immediately; the idea for Paper Leaves came from a spur-of-the-moment question. A friend asked, “If you were in a movie, what job/ career would you want?” Instantly, she responded with, “Book shop owner,” as her passion for literature and reading was a constant in her life.

With COVID minimizing her hours, she began working on that dream of opening a bookstore. The plan was to initially open in the square in downtown Waxahachie. Still, the building owner questioned Gabrielle’s ability to run a business since she did not receive a college degree in the field, but Gabrielle pushed on. When she found the building Paper Leaves currently resides in, the owners wanted it to be a pizza parlor. It took convincing, but she was given a year to make the bookstore work.

In the months leading up to Paper Leaves’ opening, the building underwent massive renovations and redecorations, with friends and family pitching in to build bookshelves and helping her pick furniture from antique shops. On top of that, Gabrielle still needed a major player in her business—books and plants.

There is little to no guidance on how one creates a bookshop, let alone a successful one. So Gabrielle began visiting other bookstores in the Dallas Metroplex to figure out the details of how to find a build her store's inventory and expand her knowledge of popular genres and authors. Finding a plant wholesaler was more accessible but required her to be on a waiting list for a year. However, when she registered with her plant wholesaler, she was approved in 12 hours due to a fluke in the system. Everything seemed to fall into place, but a week before the shop’s grand opening, her books had not been delivered, and her certification to sell books had not been approved. Gabrielle did not have everything she needed to open her business until the day before opening.