The Story Behind Chrysalis
Meet the Founder
I am Jean Marie Johnson: artist, photographer, creative director, and the person behind everything here. Chrysalis Design Studio is where my creative life and my professional life finally came together, built around a belief I hold without apology: that creativity is our most powerful tool as human beings, and that it belongs to all of us.
Through art, photography, business design, and CalmTube, I want to create work that nourishes the spirit, honors the natural world, and reminds people of something they already know: that everything they need is already there. It may just need the right conditions to reorganize itself.
A growing portion of the Chrysalis collection is dedicated to endangered and threatened species and places, with proceeds going to organizations actively working to protect them. Because creative energy is a conduit, and some of it belongs to the world that makes it possible.
About the Logo
The Chrysalis Design Studio logo is assembled from my own watercolor paintings: the chrysalis from the monarch I filmed for the “What is a Chrysalis?” video, and Beatrice herself, as she appears in the original painting Backyard Joy.
A swooping arc I painted connects them, chrysalis to butterfly, marking the journey between the two. It also happens to form the letter C. That part was an accident. The best things usually are.
Maybe something on a wall caught your eye. Maybe you're an entrepreneur ready for a creative partner who takes your vision seriously. Maybe you found your way here through calm, or curiosity, or your own quiet season of grief or transition.
Whatever brought you: welcome. This is a space for people who believe the world is worth paying attention to. Who suspect their own creativity is trying to tell them something.
I believe it is. I hope Chrysalis helps you hear it.
~ Jean Marie Johnson
What I hope this is for you.
The Personal Story Behind Chrysalis
There are moments that arrive quietly and change everything anyway. Mine arrived in the form of a monarch butterfly in the grass.
My grandmother Beatrice (“mamaw” to me) had just passed away, and with her went something I hadn't realized I'd been leaning on: a kind of anchor, a particular quality of presence in my life that had always been there and suddenly wasn't. It felt like an actual part of me had gone.
Then my dog Yoda found her: a monarch butterfly, perfect in every visible way, sitting in the yard. But, she couldn't fly. I tried everything to help her take flight. She just never could.
So she stayed with us, and I named her Beatrice. Of course. For 11 weeks, she lived with us: going on walks, spending her days among flowers, having her own room at night full of plants and calm. I learned how to feed her, what she liked, how to pay attention to something small and alive when the world felt heavy. She lifted me. In her, I felt the presence of my grandmother: something gentle, unhurried, and unwilling to be rushed.
When Beatrice eventually passed, I was heartbroken again. But I was also different.
What the Chrysalis Taught Me
I became captivated by the butterfly life cycle: particularly by what happens inside the chrysalis.
The caterpillar doesn't just grow wings in there. It essentially dissolves, breaking down into imaginal cells: a biological blueprint that already contains everything needed to become a butterfly.
Nothing is lost. Everything is reorganized. What emerges was always there, waiting for the right conditions.
I have never stopped thinking about this. I believe it's what creativity does to us, when we let it.
All Connected
Yoda lived four more years after Beatrice, and when he passed, I found I had tools I hadn't had before. The practice of paying attention. The understanding that nothing is truly lost, only transformed. We loved the life we shared with him, and we carried everything he gave us forward.
My husband Scott has been my partner in all of this: my most steadfast believer, the one who saw what I was capable of before I could see it myself, and who gave me the courage to finally build Chrysalis Design Studio.
And now we have Obi: a poodle who arrived feeling somehow sent, carrying something of Yoda while being entirely his own creature. Scott and I are convinced he travels the same golden thread.
He recently walked us right past a downed butterfly, close enough that I saw it and mercifully not close enough that he did. Because Obi, bless him, is a hopeless and enthusiastic chomper of flying things. I was able to intervene quietly, activate the butterfly ICU, and reflect, not for the first time, that the universe has a sense of humor and that the thread keeps finding us.